Politics of Archiving: Hawkers and Pavement Dwellers in Calcutta

Dialect Anthropol (2011) 35:295316 DOI 10.
1007/s10624-010-9199-1
Politics of archiving: hawkers and pavement dwellers in Calcutta

Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay
Published online: 24 September 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010e
Abstract In the last decade, several inuential 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 functionwhich is conventionally associated with the governmental statesections 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 inuential theoretical positions such as Arjun Appadurais deep democracy argument (Appadurai 2002), Partha Chatterjees political society (Chatterjee 2004) argument, and Ananya Roys 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: ritajyoti1981@yahoo.com
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scholars reect primarily on two sets of questions: the capacities of the poor in relation to the character of mobilizations, and the states 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 reects on the hawkers question in Calcutta. The paper looks at the landscape of knowledge production in Calcutta surrounding the footpath hawkershow 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 Foucaults (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 states ethical justication 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 example, 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 rulethe epistemological basis on which assemblage of knowledge and verication of truths take place to guide and manage a populations interests (Ghertner 2010, 186187). Various studies have also bolstered the methodological relevance of calculative politics within the exercise and execution of governmental power (see Elden 2007; Legg 2006). Several works on governmentality have also reected 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
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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 reects the growing inuence of Foucaults notion of the knowledge/power problematic, it is also a product of the statist turn in recent reections 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 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 Castellss (1989) model of the informational city and Harold Inns (1950) classic work on social communication to reect on knowledge communities and communication networks. Bayly, in his inuential 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, inuenced by Foucauldian and Saidian reections 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).
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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 countermapping 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, classication, circulation and consumption of governmental knowledge and make claims on the state in an archival space. In doing so, one may remember Ananya Roys 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 NGOs 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 inuence 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 ofcial 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,
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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
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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 gure signicantly 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 exemplies 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, ruralurban 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 conicts and collaboration. Third, unlike the slum dwellers and squatter groups, hawkers and pavement dwellers are not electorally signicant 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.
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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 conned to certain parts of the city and to specied locations where there might be no interference with the normal ow of trafc. 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).
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mobilization of urban poor in post-colonial India, often vilied 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 understandinghowever hazy and indeterminate it may beof 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 insiders knowledge. I have been, for the most part, myself an observer from the outside. The ` -vis what Partha Chatterjee (2004) paper is concerned with my positionality vis-a 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.
Anthropology and history were long seen as compatible enquiries into discrete spheres of alterity (the vi-Strauss assured us several decades ago, the anthropologist conceives [history] past, elsewhere). As Le 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 difcult to delineate a common epistemological space which can be termed historical anthropology (quoted in Axel 2002, viii). Cohns 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 eldseen both as textual, interpretive activities, as disciplinary conventions, and as strategic spatializations of overdetermined empirical data (5455).
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Blocking the gaze I started my eld 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 eld 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 scientic and effective ways of ethnographic penetration to the subjects 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 eld data that I could gather after the HSC afliates began to trust me. Let me synoptically present a few interesting patterns in the history of footpath hawking in Calcutta. First, one may nd 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.
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Just before the ofcial 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 trafc at key intersections, burning buses, gheraoing police posts, blocking infrastructures of circulation and moving to the Court seeking redressal (HSC 2006: 17). 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 condence 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 conicts 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 Sangram is 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 afliates 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 afliated 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 yover, Shaktiman oated a new Hawkers Union named the Calcutta Hawker Mens Union and was able to resettle hawkers beneath the yover. 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 Mens Union has been the major constituent if the HSC, which has roughly 30 thousand afliates. Shaktimans ofce maintains a complete digital and paper database on them.
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The world of survey In December 2005, The Calcutta Municipal Corporation (henceforth the Corporation) 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 post1977 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 Operation Sunshine, 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 led a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) in the High Court seeking the Courts 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 signicant number of hawkers without resettlement. The HSC made two signicant 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 eld survey. Sujit Mukherjee, popularly known as Naughty-da in
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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 gure in his ofce. He is known for his close relation with the HSC as well. Apart from conducting the eld research, Naughty-da had mediated between the Mayors ofce 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 gure in the mainstream hierarchy of CPM.5 In 2007, the Corporation took the initiative of creating an ofcial 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-das 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 Corporations 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-nancing and selfsustaining 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 middleclass 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 identied 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 postOperation Sunshine ashood, 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 afliates. 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 ve times in the chamber of the Mayor. If the Mayor put forward any proposal for eviction, Shaktiman
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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.
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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 HSCs afliate 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 HSCs afliates had been operating in the said area since the 1980s, he presented the past eviction records attested by the Corporation, records of raid and conscation 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 certicate, or a release order of conscated goods. The papers contain dates, signatures of ofcials and stamps. If necessary they also make use of blood donation certicates, 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 ofce of the HSC at College Street for the rst time in April 2007. It was extremely difcult to talk to Shaktiman as he was a busy person. He was an important leader of the National Alliance of Peoples 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 rst visited the ofce of the HSC, Shaktiman was in Chile attending a conference. But two of his trusted lieutenants who actually managed the ofce, Sudipta Maitra and Murad Hussain, talked to me. Murad assured me that I would be able to see some of the documents. But the organizations condential 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 organizations ability to maintain archival secrecy helped me understand the archival eld 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 Murads statement). Murad knew that those documents might contradict the ofcial
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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 others 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 HSCs archival function, I argue, is a successful replication of the states 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 rst 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 leftwing poets who found their subject in the everyday city life and its mundane horror. In Buddhadev Boses 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 writers block, remembers a scene from Dantes 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
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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 spacea 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, ruralurban migration, refugee problem and poverty. In these works, the pavement dweller represented the destitute migrant who needed to be studied. In his pathbreaking ethnography, titled Bengal Famine 1943 that came out in 1949, Tarak Chandra Das wrote: Many of these families had a xed 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 xed places in order to keep contact with one another. It was not unusual to nd 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 rst 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 dene 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. CMDAs 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 tourismMother Teresa in her white robes blessing the poor; Patrick Swayze as the saviour in the Hollywood lm City of Joy. For poverty tourists, the
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indigent body on the footpath was the much sought after visual proof of the postcolonial urban predicament.
A story of forgetting But this trend would change course in 1990s, when the growing concern for the citys world-class appearance came to be expressed through an environmental discourse of cleanliness and pollution. This discourse ties deciencies in environmental 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 rst 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 ruralurban migration in the early 1990s. Unlike in 1970s, pavement dwellers were no longer the subject of the states welfare intervention in 1990s. As a result, they ceased to be a population group. Moreover, in accordance with the earlier studies, the socioeconomic 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 ofcial papers, the pavement dwellers are hardly recognized. In the post-Operation Sunshine ashood, 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 rst 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 themselvesWe the Invisible.
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As the title of the document suggests, it was through this survey that they made themselves visiblevisible in the state and in public discourse to earn an enrolment as a governmental category. Unlike HSCs 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 Roys 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 Chatterjees Politics of the Governed 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 Anjarias 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, Anjarias research and my intervention speak of the difference between two political elds. 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 eld 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)dened. 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 led by middle-class environmental organizations, the hawkers were held responsible for trafc 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
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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 StreetJawharlal Nehru Road intersection, Russell Street and Elgin Road. The Park StreetJawharlal 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 StreetJawharlal Nehru Road, the citys major star hotels (linked to the international tourism industries), restaurants, banks, giant corporation ofces (such as TATA centre, Reliance Industries) are located, while, Elgin Road has the pride of housing the citys one of the biggest multiplexesthe 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 teams rather ceremonial survey, they gave me a three-point reply: (1) we dont want them to see the lth 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 condent 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 ofcials would ensure that the team would visit only the selected sites.
Entrepreneurial poor On July 28, 1972, the Chowringhee Hawkers Association afliated 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 ank 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
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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 afliated 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 nal 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 reective 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 governments nal disposal of the matter, whereby bona de 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 alternativeproviding image of the poor hawker. The aforementioned memorandum formed a moral critique of the state (which failed to look after its poor citizens) and justied 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
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made to the state was an allowance of toleration. The document also denes what it means to be a bona de 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 ofcial 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 dene 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 selfimprovement. 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 poors 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) nds 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-sufcient, selfproviding entrepreneurs are valorized as the ideal citizens who qualify for credit without asset.
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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 eld of knowledge production. The counter-archive not only resisted the negative citations of the hawkers in the media, but also challenged the ethnographers 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 HSCs archive? Is this a case of the states cooptation of the movement? Or is it the movements willingness to be appropriated in its own terms? If the rst question is answered in the afrmative, 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 afrmative answer, then one can think of a space that can be called the state-union complexan ensemble of administrative techniques in which one nd 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: Appadurais deep democracy with Millennial Mumbai, Holstons insurgent citizenship (2008) with Brasilia, Bayats encroachment (Bayat 2000) perspective with Cairo and Partha Chatterjees political society perspective with Calcutta. The signicance 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 reconceptualization of archive might provide a useful way to comprehend the popular politics in Indian democracy. In this connection, I nd 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.
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The hallmark of Chatterjees political society argument is that it collectively violates law and encroaches on infrastructure to survive. This collectivity in claimmaking is the community in political society. And here lies its major difference with civil society in which one cannot nd 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 Chatterjees inuential 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 protmaking corporate capital opening up new frontiers of Primitive Accumulation of Capital, political society offers a space for the management of non-corporate capitalthe 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 reunication 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 HSCs 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 selfgoverned individual as the ideal citizen. The collective claim of the HSC thus slips into a claim for right-bearing entrepreneursa new qualier 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 Chatterjees 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 ofcials, 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 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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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 strategicabout constructing hegemony through the combination of coercion and consent. Moving onto Foucault, Chatterjees conception of governmentality appears to impose a binary between those who govern and those who are governed that seems heavy handed in relation to Foucaults 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 beingan institution that stands above the society.
Acknowledgments This article is a part of the authors 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.
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Prahalad, C.K. 2004. The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid: Eradicating poverty through prots. Upper Saddle River, N.J: Wharton School Publishing. Pratibandhi Udyog. (2007). A pilot project survey report of street hawkers or vendors of Gariahat Road and 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): 91113. Roy, A. 2002. City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the politics of poverty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Roy, A. 2004. The gentlemans city: Urban informality in the Calcutta of new communism. In Urban informality, eds. N. AlSayyad and A. Roy, 147170. Lexington: Lexington Books. Roy, A. 2009. Civic governmentality: The politics of inclusion in Beirut and Mumbai. Antipode 41(1): 159179. Sanyal, K. 2007. Rethinking capitalist development: Primitive accumulation, governmentality and postcolonial capitalism. New Delhi: Routledge. Sengupta, D. 2007. The refugee city: partition and Kolkatas 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, Chiles street markets. Qualitative Sociology 29: 507530. Stoller, P. 1996. Spaces, places, and elds: The politics of West African trading in New York Citys informal economy. American Anthropologist 98(4): 776788. Stoller, P. 2002. Money has no smell: The Africanization of New York City. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press.
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Dialect Anthropol (2011) 35:317321 DOI 10.1007/s10624-011-9231-0
Comment on Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyays Politics of archiving: hawkers and pavement dwellers in Calcutta
Michaeline A. Crichlow
Published online: 10 June 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
In the wake of Keith Harts classic (1973) essay on Ghana and his popularization of the concept of informal economy, a veritable academic industry on informality arosethe 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 neoliberalisms touted benets 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 e perspective arguing that capital had always incorporated a mix of labor longue dure 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 dened according to their political economic weight and conceptualized relationally, as core, periphery, and semiperiphery 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 e-mail: crichlow@duke.edu
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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 others 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 dened 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 reconguring their identities and livelihoods in such movements were necessarily informal workers, but signicant numbers were. Because of this, some general conclusions can be drawn about the way that these social movements emerged as veritable alternatives to ofcial projects of naming, developing, and belonging. Yet most of these studies allude to how these marginals using the masters 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 dene themselves through surveys and appropriate their own mechanisms of governmentality that subverted those produced by state government but also inuenced the archiving techniques which those state ofcials used. The author compellingly demonstrates that political governmentality relies on negotiations 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
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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 redene the subjectivities of hawker members. In that way, hawkers become visible and less marginal and therefore more properly count in the eyes of state ofcials. As those who are recognized as belonging to specic 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 ofcials 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 ofcials 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 ofcials 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 ofcials 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 de 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 HSCs successes in rendering the hawkers visible necessitated, or so it would seem, that they replicate the states archiving with its inbuilt rationality of othering, where one groups freedoms, i.e., the very practice of the freedom to question, were instantiated at the expense of another. Bandyopadhyays account here of the spaces of power shaped through the informal zone operates to undermine Chatterjees (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 prot 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 socioeconomic life is hugely problematic, and the case presented here speaks to a dynamic entanglement of formal/informal relationships. Certainly, this is also underscored in
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the later informal economy literature, especially on Latin America, which directly addresses this articulation. It would seem that Chatterjees grasp of governmentality is intended to focus on power only as a tool of thinking beyond the power of statesits negative sense. The case presented here suggests both the governors (state) and the governed (HSC/hawkers) actively inuencing the governmental elds 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 signicant 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 Foucaults 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 unions 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 eld enabling the government of themselves. This is especially pertinent since in this attempt to practice a certain freedom, and question ofcial 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. Reconguring citizenship is a game reecting not only inclusions but exclusions as well (Somers 2008). Certainly linking ethnography to the eld 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 eld 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 ofcials reconsidered how to govern?
References
Alvarez, Sonia, Evelyn Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar. 1998. Cultures of politics: Politics of cultures: Revisioning Latin American social movements. Colorado: Westview Press. Appadurai, Arjun. 2002. Deep democracy: Urban governmentality and the horizon of politics. Public Culture 14(1): 2147.
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Bayat, Asef. 2000. From Dangerous Classes to Quiet Rebels: Politics of the urban subaltern in the global south. International Sociology 15: 533557. Cadman, Louisa. 2010. How (not) to be governed: Foucault, critique, and the political. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28: 539556. Chatterjee, Partha. 2008. Democracy and economic transformation in India. Economic and Political Weekly 43(16): 5362 (April 1925). Crichlow, Michaeline. 1998. Reconguring the informal sector divide: State, capitalism and struggle in Trinidad and Tobago. In Latin American Perspectives 98, 25(2): 6283. ndez-Kelly, Patricia, and Jon Shefner. 2006. Out of the shadows: Political action and the informal Ferna economy in Latin America. Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press. Hart, Keith. 1973. Informal income opportunities and urban employment in Ghana. Journal of Modern African Studies 11(1): 6189. 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.
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Who counts, rules: Comment on Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay, Politics of archiving: hawkers and pavement dwellers in Calcutta
Miguel Angel Centeno
More than 35 years ago, Steven Lukes reminded us that power is never a simple and supercial thing. It is never enough to know or explain what happens in smoke lled 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 demonstrated that the lenses through which the state saw the society around it (censuses, maps) shaped the denition of aspirations and the design of policies. How one sees determines what one does. Bandyopadhyays 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 e-mail: cenmiga@princeton.edu
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retain a signicantly differential degree of agency in dening 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 ts 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 les, and bank balance sheets), the power of dening 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 ofcious 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
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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 difcult challenges can be ignored. This was made innitely 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 de actors and even wear latex gloves when the tourists come to gawk. These are the deserving poor.
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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 Calcuttas high rises are also relevant for those far below.
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Comment on Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay, Politics of archiving: hawkers and pavement dwellers in 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 rst 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 signicant 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 Chatterjees 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 e-mail: eddierodrigues@gmail.com
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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 difculty 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 statesociety relations in West Bengal, especially following the recent state use of violence in Singur and Nandigram. Chatterjees 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 nds 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 difcult 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 hawkers 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
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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 exibility 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 states 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 hawkers archive in its functioning has much in common with the exclusionary politics of governmental regimes under capitalism.
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A historian among anthropologists: comments on Politics of Archiving

Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay
Published online: 8 September 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 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, reections on my research that earned me a doctoral degree. However, more than that, they stimulate me to bring to the fore a few signicant 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 reection 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 reexive 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 reect on four interconnected 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 specicities 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 Chatterjees 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 e-mail: ritajyoti1981@yahoo.com
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(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 insignicant to mention that the footpath was rst 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 benet 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 afliated 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 eld
1 2
Here, I have been inuenced by the work of Sideris and Ehrenfeucht (2009).
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 afliated to registered trade unions.
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work with hawkers after the regime shift in 2011, I saw that the HSC had started organizing rallies in favor of the ruling Trinamul CongressCongress 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 Chatterjees 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) les archived in the Ofce of the Special Branch (SB) of Kolkata Police, and the contemporary newspaper reportage on hawkers issues. Three signicant 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 afliated 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 afliated to the Indian Trade Union Congress, the labor wing of the ruling Congress Party. The Daily Notes les 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 afliations 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
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was ofcially 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 afliated to the INTUC (Anandabazar Patrika 29 March 1975). Within a few days of its formation, the Muslim League also joined the Coordination Committee (Ofce 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 Lenins statue in Esplanades 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 rst saying invoked the popular left jargon of internationally united struggle of the poor against class oppression, the second one declared the committees 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 Elakar Hawker Uchchheder Poriprikshete Janasadharaner Nikat Muslim League Er Abedan (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
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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 ndings of the survey of the Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority (CMDA) done by Jagannathan and Halder in 1987. Their research ndings 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.
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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 signicant near wholesale markets, dockyards and railway stations. The survey enumerates several occupational 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 conated with homelessness and the subsequent condition of extreme poverty and deprivation. The CMDA surveyors observed that three out of ve 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 ruralurban 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 rst half of 1980s. The left discourse of sonar bangla that was vigorously propagated by the mainstream lefts in India to showcase the left exceptionalism was entangled with the neoliberal celebration of the entrepreneurial 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 difcult to get the authentic voice from the eld 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 ethnographythey 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 ofce 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
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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 entitiesthat archive and archiving are outcomes of organizational contexts within which they are generated and preserved (Stoler 2002). In Politics of Archiving, 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 subjectthe 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 reects on how all archives are formed and maintained in specic 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.
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Conclusion To summarize the theoretical intervention of the paper, let me say that I have made three points in relation to Chatterjees 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 benets from the government. It is hard to deny that Chatterjees 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 selfvalorization 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 Archiving shows, implicated in the histories of subject formations?
References
Primary sources
Ofce 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. Ofce 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).
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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, PoliticsA Study of Major Crossings and 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. Archival Science 1(3): 324. Jagannathan, V., and A. Halder. 1988a. Income-housing linkages: a case study of pavement dwellers in Calcutta. Economic and Political Weekly 23(23): 11751178. 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): 26022605. 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): 315318. Lefebvre, H. 1997. The Production of Space (Extracts). In Rethinking architecture: A reader in cultural theory, ed. N. Leach, 138146. London: Routledge. Roy, A. 2011. Slumdog cities: Rethinking subaltern urbanism. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35(2): 223238. Sideris, A.L., and R. Ehrenfeucht. 2009. Sidewalks: Conict and negotiation over public space. Cambridge. Stoler, A.L. 2002. Colonial archives and the arts of governance. Archival Science 2: 87109.
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Dialect Anthropol (2011) 35:295316 DOI 10.

Politics of archiving: hawkers and pavement dwellers in Calcutta

Published online: 24 September 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010e

Politics of archiving: hawkers and pavement dwellers in Calcutta

Politics of archiving: hawkers and pavement dwellers in Calcutta

Politics of archiving: hawkers and pavement dwellers in Calcutta

Politics of archiving: hawkers and pavement dwellers in Calcutta

Politics of archiving: hawkers and pavement dwellers in Calcutta

Politics of archiving: hawkers and pavement dwellers in Calcutta

Politics of archiving: hawkers and pavement dwellers in Calcutta

Politics of archiving: hawkers and pavement dwellers in Calcutta

Politics of archiving: hawkers and pavement dwellers in Calcutta

Politics of archiving: hawkers and pavement dwellers in Calcutta

Dialect Anthropol (2011) 35:317321 DOI 10.1007/s10624-011-9231-0

Published online: 10 June 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Politics of archiving: hawkers and pavement dwellers in Calcutta

Politics of archiving: hawkers and pavement dwellers in Calcutta

Dialect Anthropol (2011) 35:323326 DOI 10.1007/s10624-011-9235-9

Published online: 14 June 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Who counts, rules: Comment on Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay

Dialect Anthropol (2011) 35:327329 DOI 10.1007/s10624-011-9236-8

Published online: 15 June 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

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Dialect Anthropol (2011) 35:331339 DOI 10.1007/s10624-011-9243-9

A historian among anthropologists: comments on Politics of Archiving

Published online: 8 September 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

A historian among anthropologists

A historian among anthropologists

A historian among anthropologists

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