Sociology of South Asia: Postcolonial Legacies, Global Imaginaries 3030970299, 9783030970291

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Sociology of South Asia Postcolonial Legacies, Global Imaginaries

Edited by  Smitha Radhakrishnan · Gowri Vijayakumar

Sociology of South Asia “This feels like the book I have long been waiting for!! Thoughtful, provocative and timely, this much-needed volume opens up new conceptual possibilities both for the study of South Asia and for American Sociology. It provides a nuanced critique of the parochial lens of American Sociology even as it offers powerful examples of how the study of South Asia can profoundly alter our understanding of key sociological concepts of tradition/modernity, class, nationalism and neoliberalism. It also makes evident that the study of colonialism is necessary to understand the contemporary social world, thus leading the way to creating a sociology that is both historically grounded and global in its possibilities.” —Raka Ray, University of California, Berkeley “The cutting-edge scholarship in this volume revitalises classic themes in sociology by injecting a fresh post-colonial sensibility into richly grounded research. By critically engaging with disciplinary legacies and going beyond them, it illuminates how keywords like identity, inequality, intersectionality, and agency can be reimagined through a commitment to locally-anchored global subjects.” —Amita Baviskar, Ashoka University (Sonipat) “This call to arms offers readers a powerful rethinking of sociology on South Asia—its questions, theoretical frameworks, answers, and audiences. But Radhakrishnan and Vijayakumar’s contributions go much farther. They challenge all sociologists interested in the world—which is every one of us—to fundamentally rethink what we do. A much needed, provocative reframing of what sociology can and should be.” —Peggy Levitt, Wellesley College and Harvard University

Smitha Radhakrishnan  •  Gowri Vijayakumar Editors

Sociology of South Asia Postcolonial Legacies, Global Imaginaries

Editors Smitha Radhakrishnan Department of Sociology Wellesley College Wellesley, MA, USA

Gowri Vijayakumar Department of Sociology Brandeis University Waltham, MA, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-97029-1    ISBN 978-3-030-97030-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97030-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Ganesh Ramachandran This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

Our thanks to all the participants in the initial mini-conference at the Eastern Sociological Society’s 2019 gathering that set us off on the journey to this book. We especially appreciate Mary al-Sayed for seeing the potential for the book in the gathering that we organized, and for the Eastern Sociological Society as an organization for providing the institutional space to make our generative meeting possible. Our thanks to all the contributors to this volume, who responded to multiple rounds of feedback from two editors with grace and hard work. Your commitment to the cause of deparochializing our discipline and making those essential connections between the local and global inspire us to continue our work. We are grateful to Sanchita Dasgupta and Sarah Halford for meticulous, enthusiastic research and editorial assistance over the course of this project. The Theodore and Jane Norman Fund for Faculty Research and Creative Projects and Tomberg Research Funds, both from Brandeis University, funded the important work of these graduate students. We appreciate the editorial assistance from Palgrave, provided by Elizabeth Graber, Anisha Rajavikraman, and Chandralekha Mahamel Raja. Finally, we thank our spouses, children, and friends for providing endless support and encouragement as we set out to make this book a reality. Our transnational histories and futures remind us constantly of how badly we all need a fairer world.

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Contents

1 Sociology of South Asia: In Waiting for the Revolution  1 Gowri Vijayakumar and Smitha Radhakrishnan Part I State-Led Modernization Projects  35 2 Between Women and the State: Rights Brokers and Capital Accumulation in West Bengal 37 Poulami Roychowdhury 3 Degrees of Freedom: Strategic (Non)engagement in Land Markets 67 Beth Prosnitz 4 “(Hindu) Workers of India, Unite!”: How Class Politics Shape the Consolidation of Right-Wing Hegemony in India  93 Smriti Upadhyay 5 Traditional Genders, Modern Sexualities: Struggles over Sexual and Gender Nonconformity in Postcolonial India121 Chaitanya Lakkimsetti

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Part II Diasporic Mediations 151 6 Veiled Sociology: The Epistemologies of Purdah and Two-Boat Ethnography153 Fauzia Husain 7 Interweaving Afro-Asian Solidarity: A Global Textile Factory Floor in Ethiopia177 Manjusha Nair 8 “Give In, Cut Your Hair … Or It Makes You a Very Strong Person”: Diasporic Sikhs, Transnational Racialization, and Embodied Identity205 Shruti Devgan Part III Place-Making/Identity-Making 233 9 Of Tigers and Temples: The Jaffna Caste System in Transition During the Sri Lankan Civil War235 Prashanth Kuganathan 10 Experiencing the City as Workers: The Spatial Practices of Women Beauty and Retail Workers in Karachi, Pakistan267 Sidra Kamran 11 Caste-ing Space: Mapping the Dynamics of Untouchability in Rural Bihar, India293 Indulata Prasad 12 Following the Prophet’s Sunnah: Class, Piety, and Power in a Pakistani Bazaar323 Umair Javed

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13 “Bodybuilding Does Not Need American Certifications”: Cultural Entrepreneurship in Times of Globalization in Contemporary Bengal351 Jaita Talukdar Index377

Notes on Contributors

Shruti Devgan  is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Bowdoin College, USA. Her research interests include transnational flows, collective memory, trauma, narratives, and media. She is working on a book manuscript on the digital, diasporic, and intergenerational memories of the anti-­Sikh violence of 1984. She has written on these topics in Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, Contexts, and other outlets. She also serves on the editorial board of the Sikh Research Journal. Fauzia Husain  is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Gender and the Economy (GATE), Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Canada. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia Sociology Department in 2019. Her research investigates how marginalized people navigate mechanisms of exclusion and inequality, such as stigma, and cultivate inclusion at work and in their intimate lives. Umair Javed  is Assistant Professor of Politics and Sociology at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Pakistan. He completed his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 2018, specializing in political sociology and political economy. His research studies the intersection of politics, culture, and development under the context of informality, mostly in South Asia. Sidra Kamran  is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the New School for Social Research, USA. She uses qualitative methods to research topics related to labor, gender, class, culture, and economy. Her dissertation research focuses on women and beauty retail workxi

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ers’ experiences of work, space, and intimacy in Karachi, and her other research project examines working-class women’s use of TikTok in relation to changing gender norms in Pakistan. Prashanth Kuganathan  is a postdoctoral teaching associate/lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA.  He was conferred his Ph.D. in Applied Anthropology (Teachers College) and his M.A. in South Asian Studies, both from Columbia University. His doctoral dissertation “Remaking Lives in Northern Sri Lanka: Migration, Schooling, and Language in Postwar Jaffna” examines the intersections of war, education, and linguistic practice in what is considered the most conservative region of the country. The chapter in this volume is a modified and updated chapter from his M.A. thesis on caste in contemporary Jaffna. Chaitanya Lakkimsetti  is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Texas A&M University, USA.  She is the author of Legalizing Sex: Sexual Minorities, AIDS, and Citizenship in India (2020). Her work at the intersections of sexuality, law, and social movements also appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Sexualities, Positions: Asia Critique, and Qualitative Sociology. Manjusha  Nair  is Associate Professor of Sociology at George Mason University, USA. Her research has been on the possibilities and limitations of the counter-hegemonic processes that challenge neoliberal globalization in the Global South. She is the author of the award-winning book, Undervalued Dissent: Informal Workers’ Politics in India (2016). Her current research examines Indian economic flows to Africa, through the lens of historically embedded anti-colonial resistance and postcolonial collaborations, yet made relevant in the neoliberal context. Indulata Prasad  is Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University, USA. Her current research uses social mapping alongside ethnography to examine how legal rights to redistributed land has impacted Dalit (former untouchable) lives. Her articles have appeared in Economic and Political Weekly and Women’s Studies International Forum. Beth  Prosnitz  is a Ph.D.  Candidate in Sociology at The University of Texas at Austin, USA. Smitha Radhakrishnan  is LuElla LaMer Professor of Women’s Studies and Sociology at Wellesley College, USA. She is the author of Appropriately

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Indian: Gender and Culture in a New Transnational Class (2011) and Making Women Pay: Microfinance in Urban India (2022). Poulami Roychowdhury  is Associate Professor of Sociology at McGill University, USA. Her research examines the relationships between gender inequality, crime, and politics. Her book, Capable Women, Incapable States: Negotiating Violence and Rights in India, was published in 2021. Jaita Talukdar  is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Loyola University New Orleans, USA.  Focusing on South Asia with Kolkata, West Bengal, as her research site, her research examines social institutions of eating, fitness, appearance, and overall wellbeing and provides insights into issues of cultural identity, embodiment, belongingness, self-worth, and representation brought about by rapidly changing economic and social orders. She is experienced in doing qualitative research via interviews and in-depth narrative analysis, and has written in leading sociology journals. Smriti  Upadhyay  received her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, USA, in 2021. Her research is concerned with understanding the rise of the right-wing, global social protests, inequality, and development in India. Gowri  Vijayakumar  is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University, USA.  She is the author of At Risk: Indian Sexual Politics and the Global AIDS Crisis (2021) and has published in World Development, Social Problems, and Gender and Society, among other journals.

List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2 Fig. 9.3 Fig. 11.1

Fig. 11.2 Fig. 11.3

Fig. 11.4 Fig. 12.1

The organization of the Sangh Parivar (not all members are pictured). Diagram by author 103 Castes in Jaffna. (Chart by author based on data from Jeeweshwara Räsänen (2015)) 240 Veḷl ̣ālạ r patronized Ā gamic village temple. (Photo by author) 254 Pañcamar patronized non-Ā gamic village temple. (Photo by author)259 Map of Kaari drawn by Bhuiyan Dalit women showing spatial arrangements of housing, including the dih in the southwest (lower right), and location of resources east of the center of the village (vertical black line at left represents the naala [rivulet]) (December 2012). (Photo by author) 302 Bhuiyan Dalit woman sketching badka kuan (main village well) covered with thorny branches (May 2012). (Photo by author)308 Map showing location of two hand pumps in the new mixed-caste neighborhood in northern Kaari. Each of the three mapmakers in this session had their own chalk color (May 2012). (Photo by author) 309 Non-Dalit women washing clothes at the badka kuan (March 2014). (Photo by author) 310 The inscription reads: “Oh Allah, Please keep my country safe”—sponsored by Haji Hanif, the head of a local traders’ association. (Photo by author) 335

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CHAPTER 1

Sociology of South Asia: In Waiting for the Revolution Gowri Vijayakumar and Smitha Radhakrishnan

The revolutions long identified as “missing” by feminist, queer, and postcolonial sociologists (Stacey and Thorne 1985; Stein and Plummer 1996; Ray 2006; Bhambra 2010) may finally have begun to arrive. North American sociologists are reckoning with the erasure of race from the tenets of so-called mainstream sociological teaching and practice and the profound anti-Blackness that lies at the heart of that erasure (Morris 2017; Itzigsohn and Brown 2020). This reckoning has emerged alongside efforts to conceptualize a postcolonial sociology (Connell 2007a; Bhambra 2013; Steinmetz 2014; Go 2016). Renewed attention to postcolonial and

We would like to thank Dwaipayan Banerjee and Sneha Annavarapu for their incisive comments and feedback on this introductory chapter, and Sanchita Dasgupta for her thorough and insightful background research. G. Vijayakumar Department of Sociology, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] S. Radhakrishnan (*) Department of Sociology, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Radhakrishnan, G. Vijayakumar (eds.), Sociology of South Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97030-7_1

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decolonial perspectives in North American sociology has pushed a rethinking of the place of sociology in global knowledge production and the dynamics of empire (Magubane 2013; Steinmetz 2013), as well as a rethinking of core concepts in sociology, including race, gender, globalization, modernity, and the state (Magubane 2004; Connell 2007b; Bhambra 2007; Steinmetz 2017; Ray 2018). It was in this context that, in the spring of 2019, we gathered a group of sociologists of South Asia as part of a mini-conference at the Eastern Sociological Society’s Annual Meetings in Boston. For many participants, any pending revolutions in sociological thinking still felt far away. We had all been told by colleagues that we needed to provide “more background” for our research to make it accessible to Western audiences; that we should justify why our research sites offered analytical leverage or were worth studying; that our topics of study were marginal, unusual, unwieldy; that the names of our research subjects were difficult to pronounce; that we would need to trim our theoretical ambitions to fit North American lineages in order to make our work legible. We had all found ourselves straddling multiple disciplines—history, anthropology, sociology, international studies, gender studies—in order to find intellectual “homes.” At the same time, we had struggled with the odd condition of the diasporic academic in our research in South Asia. We had grappled with our own privileges in the course of fieldwork, felt how our Western training sometimes limited our ability to engage with regional intellectual debates, and were pushed to serve as mediators and translators across distinct intellectual worlds. Indeed, many of our conference participants had trained in sociology in both South Asia and North America and had learned to move across disciplinary geographies, recalibrating theoretical vocabularies along the way. Given all this, there was an immediate sense of familiarity in the room when we began the conference, a palpable sense of relief. We did not have to begin our presentations with a litany of maps and numbers to establish the worthiness or relevance of our research sites, or make sweeping statements about the kind of “case” South Asian sites offered. South Asia was the site of analysis, not exoticist fascination or cold indifference; and our hybrid theoretical engagements became a strength rather than a liability or a sign of inauthenticity. Our intention with this book, which grew out of that initial conference, is not simply to present work on one, marginal site of sociological research. Rather, we aim to move the study of South Asia “from margin to center” (hooks 1984) of our sociological analysis. In doing so, we take up the call

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to engage in the empirical and theoretical complexity of decolonizing our discipline (Go 2017; Connell 2018; Meghji 2021). All the chapters in the volume seek to address what Gurminder Bhambra writes is “missing in sociology: an engagement with difference that makes a difference to what was initially thought” (Bhambra 2007, 880). These studies look both to histories of colonialism and to global futures, for, as Bhambra writes, “global sociology would require sociology itself to be re-thought backward, in terms of how its core categories have been constituted in the context of particular historical narratives, as well as forwards in terms of the further implications of its reconstruction” (Bhambra 2013, 331). Bhambra’s sociology offers a global vision that, rather than marking the West as the default site of intellectual production, roots itself in dynamics of imperialism in order to deconstruct and rebuild taken-for-granted categories from the ground up. We reject an epistemology that takes Western principles as universal, instead centering social theory on historical dynamics of power and social change. We place South Asia at the center to highlight the historical ravages of colonialism, modernization projects that have defined the postcolonial era, as well as the kaleidoscopic ways in which gender, caste, class, and sexuality structure everyday life in the context of neoliberalism today. In this region, and in this volume, we can see diverse neocolonial developmental agendas imposed from outside the region, and their implications for a range of actors, from rural women to urban shopkeepers to non-­ governmental organization (NGO) employees. We can also see how, the state, ethnic and religious nationalist forces, and local capitalists work in tandem to  advance projects of dispossession  as historically entrenched inequalities deepen, and precarity becomes increasingly widespread. Placing South Asia at the center thus requires us to examine, from the vantage point of those most oppressed within the  local and global systems  that constitute neoliberalism, how the experiences of the dispossessed, who are now rendered disposable, are linked  to those of the privileged and protected. The linkages between these groups reveal local and global processes of extraction and accumulation. Our focus on these topics in our study of South Asia thus becomes urgent and political, facilitating a necessary transformation in the discipline as a whole.

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What Do We Mean by South Asia? The designation “South Asia” comes from a relatively modern, problematic geopolitical term that has little meaning in the subcontinent. Why adopt it here? And what is at stake in doing so? From the vantage point of sociology in the U.S., the term “South Asia” comprises India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, the Maldives, Sri Lanka, and Afghanistan.1 The term reflects the strategic military interests of the U.S. as they emerged after World War II, and is roughly aligned with the geographic formations of the Indo-Gangetic Plain and peninsular India (Ryabchikov et  al. 2020). The post-war naming of this region prompted a transformation in how this area of the world was studied in the increasingly powerful halls of U.S. academia. As a result, the history of South Asian Studies in the U.S. forms a crucial context for South Asian sociology. Legacies of colonialism, the Cold War, and neoliberal geopolitics have shaped histories of intellectual exchange, theoretical orientations, dominant topics of study, and resources for conducting fieldwork. Before World War II, the study of the subcontinent in the U.S. was largely the Orientalist study of linguistics and philology. Sanskrit, as part of Indo-European linguistic lineages, had been taught in the U.S. since the nineteenth century, starting with E. E. Salisbury, who taught Sanskrit at Yale starting in 1844. By 1900, Yale, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, the University of California, and the University of Chicago all offered Sanskrit (Davis 1985, 3). Columbia University established a chair in Indo-Iranian languages in 1891 (MESAAS 2022). From the 1950s onward, there was a rapid expansion in what became known as South Asian Studies in the U.S., and a shift toward the study of contemporary social and cultural aspects of South Asian life. In 1951, when the Social Science Research Council published a report on Southern Asia Studies in the United States, there were three universities in the U.S. with graduate programs on South Asia—the University of California, Berkeley; Columbia; and the University of Pennsylvania (Brown 1962). The field grew rapidly in the next few decades, and there were 15 South-Asia-focused area studies centers in the country by 1964 (Davis 1985, 26), as well as the American Institutes for Indian Studies 1  Because of the unique conditions of research and study in Afghanistan, and the limited work in sociology in and on Bhutan and the Maldives, we are unable to address these countries in this volume.

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(founded in 1961) and Pakistan Studies (founded in 1973) (AIIS 2022, AIPS 2022). The Annual Conference on South Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison—which formed its Center for South Asia in 1963— began convening in 1971 (Frykenberg 2011). The growth of South Asian Studies was fueled by collaborations between universities, the state, and private foundations concerned with countering the threat of communism in the non-Western world. Foreign language and area study programs were formed in the 1940s by the U.S. Army at 55 universities (Davis 1985, 18) to provide needed linguistic and cultural skills to support U.S. military occupations. By the 1950s, the Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford Foundations had begun to finance social science research on South Asia, supporting area studies both in the U.S. and in the subcontinent (Brown 1962; Sunil 2013). Title VI of the 1958 National Defense Education Act (NDEA) funded what would eventually be called National Resource Centers on strategic areas of the world, including South Asia, and the Mutual Education and Cultural Exchange Act, or Fulbright-Hays Act, of 1961 expanded resources for doctoral research and intellectual exchange. After the 1960s, Congress did not significantly increase Fulbright-Hays and Title VI funding again until 9/11, when the study of South Asian language, culture, and society became again crucial to U.S. defense interests and anti-terrorism campaigns (International Education Programs Service 2022). Thus, a confluence of intellectual, political, and economic dynamics forged the interdisciplinary field of South Asian Studies in the U.S. Although the various countries of the region had different relationships and local-level dynamics within the context of the British Empire, the histories of these countries unfolded in relation to one another and, broadly speaking, share many significant postcolonial legacies. The discipline of sociology in each country has unfolded in relation to a geopolitics of knowledge production in which the interests of the U.S. and Britain play a dominant role. There are also substantive similarities worthy of comparison and joint study, in terms of governance structure, social formations that include caste, rural-urban dynamics, and engagement with international development institutions and policies. While we are not invested in “South Asia” as a stable point of reference—as R. Radhakrishnan (2017, 31) notes, “I will lose no sleep if South Asian Studies as a term anticipates or enables its own obsolescence”—we find it useful here in tracing a shared set of histories and the potential for a shared intellectual future.

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A limitation of such a shared intellectual future is the fact that India often looms largest in contemporary scholarly imaginations of South Asia, due to its dominant position within enduring political and economic inequalities, as well as the formation of universities and sociological training within those inequalities. When sociologists from South Asia are read and published in the U.S., they are often sociologists from India. Sociologists of South Asia in the U.S. predominantly focus on India, and occasionally on Pakistan, Bangladesh, or Nepal. It is rare to find sociologists who study Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Burma, or Afghanistan in transnational knowledge production circuits. For those scholars who work on a site in the region outside of India, they contend with the dominance of intellectual paradigms circulating in the academy that are based solely on research on India, as Prashanth Kuganathan points out in his chapter on caste in Sri Lanka in this volume. Focusing on South Asia as a region thus allows us to expose the dominance of scholarship on India in our understanding of the region as a whole and work toward a critical perspective that decenters India. Although the dominance of India in the region is reflected in our volume, we feature work on Pakistan (Husein, Javed, Kamran), Nepal (Prosnitz), and Sri Lanka (Kuganathan). While this volume takes a step forward in countering India-centrism, the project of decolonizing sociology and decolonizing the sociology of South Asia must decenter India far more than we have been able to do here. We are also in this volume working within and against the hegemonic intellectual formations of U.S. sociology. Both editors of the volume are located in the U.S., as are many of the contributors. We consider the diasporic identities and histories of sociologists of South Asia later in this chapter. But beyond the question of location and identity, which offer only a partial understanding of intellectual trajectories and agendas, we recognize here the broad influence of U.S. sociology, its historical cooperation with Eurocentric understandings of the subcontinent, and how the categories and taken-for-granted understandings of South Asian societies normalized in U.S. academia have had an outsized influence on the current literature on South Asia. At the same time, as sociologists in North America increasingly turn to the project of decolonizing the discipline, and of rethinking the categories and concepts positioned as core to it, the fact that the sociology of South Asia has grappled with these very concerns from its inception is often overlooked. Adopting a critical stance on this transnational circuit of sociological production, we proceed in the next sections to attempt a broad understanding of where this field stands today,

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where the framing presumptions of the sociological study of South Asia came from, and the constraints that set the terms upon which sociological work on South Asia is conducted. We also show how the debates and conflicts that have been ongoing within the sociology of South Asia offer theoretical possibilities that can contribute to a radical reimagining of the discipline globally.

Where Are We Now? Constraints and Challenges in Sociological Work on South Asia Dominant paradigms of U.S. sociology regard locations within South Asia as examples of “global South” locations, marking them as distinct from the core questions of the discipline. One example of this form of marginalization is the inclusion of work on South Asia at the American Sociological Association. Most often, our work is included within sections that center “transnational” or “global South” dynamics, the project of “development,” or in sections organized around “difference” or “inequality” as an analytic—and less often in sections often considered “core” to the discipline, such as Theory and Culture. The logic behind this kind of framing for varied locations in the region of South Asia is at once additive (we need to know about that part of the world to provide a “complete” understanding of the world) and reductive (this study of slum life in India, e.g., helps us understand how livelihoods, social networks, or cultural dynamics work in an impoverished “global South” location, which can then help us understand the same phenomenon in an urban slum in a completely different part of the world). The additive dimension of this sociological epistemology aligns with a scientistic understanding of an interconnected social world that has become taken for granted in the discipline. The additive logic goes as follows: if we know about x in the U.S., Vietnam, and Kenya, knowing about x in Pakistan “fills a gap” in our knowledge and helps us understand x as a phenomenon better. Relatedly, the reductive dimension comes from sociology’s theoretical impulse to generalize and universalize within an ideally typed subset or group, and for South Asia, that ideal type is the “global South” or the “developing” world. This designation suggests a uniformity of experiences and material conditions among the nation-states that have experienced the varied violent processes of colonization, nationalism, and neoliberalization and also suggests that they are incomparable to those

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countries that have been colonial or imperial powers. According to this reasoning, we may not be able to presume that industrialization in the U.S., a “global North” country, unfolded in a way that has many similarities with industrialization in Bangladesh. However, we might be able to presume that industrialization in Bangladesh has important and informative similarities with the same process in Brazil, albeit with some modifications. This additive and reductive framing results in fraught practical negotiations for scholars of South Asia like the ones who attended our 2019 conference at the ESS. In pursuit of an elusive “legibility,” we are expected to cite theorists of state power, social movements, or cultural exchange produced in the U.S., but in the mode of “testing a theory” rather than of comparing two cases with distinct features and a historical and geopolitical relationship. When we instead choose not to cite scholarship based on U.S. presumptions to avoid such definitional negotiations, our work is labeled illegible, or even atheoretical. Furthermore, both additive and reductive approaches to South Asia limit the possibilities for comparative work by restricting the terms on which sociological work involving a comparative element may be conceptualized. These approaches within sociology also have concrete financial effects for graduate students. For example, Agarwala and Teitelbaum (2010) point to a declining share of awards for international fieldwork by U.S. sociologists, compared to anthropology and history. They argue that an increased focus on quantitative methodologies in sociology, in contrast to the expectations for area studies expertise, contextual and historical knowledge, and language skills favored by agencies that fund international fieldwork, left sociology graduate students unable to compete for funds. And yet, these presumptions have never completely constrained sociological work on South Asia in the U.S. In recent decades, the increasing migration of graduate students from the subcontinent to North America for study in the field, as well as greater interest among undergraduates in the U.S. in receiving a “global” education, has created a growing community of sociologists specializing in the study of South Asia, several of whom found their way into our 2019 meeting. We shared a conviction that the framing presumptions of these approaches were restrictive and thus, produced an impoverished social science. None of us found either additive or reductive approaches helpful, although many of us had learned to adopt such framings in order to publish in U.S. academic contexts. Furthermore, many of us were beginning to see the connections between the work we were undertaking and counterhegemonic traditions within

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the discipline. In our work, we were beginning to link Black feminist theory with Dalit feminist theory; Marxist state theory with postcolonial theorizations of the state; U.S. and European postcolonial sociologists with the debates soon after Indian independence about what it meant to produce a truly Indian sociology. Although we and our colleagues felt intellectually constrained in our task of producing sociological scholarship on our study sites in South Asia while located in the U.S., our colleagues in South Asia were not necessarily in a better position to do so. As in other parts of the world, institutions that train sociologists in South Asia face an uneven landscape of resources, ranging from a few wealthy and well-resourced universities to others with limited access to research funding, academic databases, or teaching support. A study of social science publications from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka found rapid growth in the publication of research between 1996 and 2013, but noted India’s outsized role in the region’s social science production: 84.2% of over 52,000 papers were produced in India (Dhawan et al. 2015, 10). Reflecting on Sri Lankan sociology, Perera (2005, 326) bemoaned the ossification of sociological conceptions and dependence on irrelevant imported paradigms, and compared Sri Lankan sociology to Jurassic Park, “a domain of prehistoric proportions.” Though more recent evidence shows growth in the publication of social science in Pakistan (Dhawan et al. 2015, 9), a 2005 review essay on Pakistani sociology highlighted the problem of “brain drain” (Shah et al. 2005, 367), with promising students leaving for the U.S. and not coming back. In 2002, within the two leading Indian sociological journals, researchers found that 48% of authors were based outside of South Asia, 14% at the University of Delhi, and 12% at Jawaharlal Nehru University (Chatterjee 2002, 3605). A review essay on sociology in Nepal points to a predominance of international scholars in Contributions to Nepalese Studies (Mishra 2005, 122). Sociological researchers across South Asia point out the limitations of depending on externally funded development research projects that limit the scope for theoretical experimentation (Chatterjee 2002). More generally, they complain that when they produce cutting-edge theoretical work, the geopolitics of knowledge production result in it being sidelined or overlooked. Social science citation analyses, though limited by English-language search engines and databases, find that scholars based in Asia, Africa, and Latin America tend to cite North American and European authors extensively, while North American and

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European scholars largely do not cite them (e.g., Arunachalam 2008; Mosbah-Natanson and Gingras 2014). These institutional conditions form only one part of the constraint experienced by sociologists of South Asia. Dominant paradigms of sociology have long been subjected to the structuring influences of nationalist, corporate, or NGO agendas. Furthermore, sociologists located in the subcontinent are often entangled in intellectual formations in the U.S. and Europe, while also navigating historical oppressions within South Asia, reinforced through engagements with the U.S. and Europe. Sujata Patel (2016, 2021) argues that despite their idealistic promise, early Indian sociologies bore the legacies of Eurocentrism and Orientalism and reproduced erasures along class, caste, and gender lines. Since the 1970s, Patel (2021) argues, sociology’s engagements with social movements and student activism have pushed the discipline to engage with anti-caste, feminist, and queer perspectives, but the project remains a fraught and unsteady one. Meanwhile, these very articulations and critical perspectives become the target of attacks from the majoritarian Hindu right as a site of anti-­ nationalism. As Amita Baviskar (2021) writes, even as the promise of “the university as a shared endeavour to think and dream, question and challenge,” persists, scholars struggle with ongoing job precarity and inequality, along with “the heavy tread and heavy breath of the stormtroopers stalking our steps … will I get into trouble for saying this?” Perera (2005) argues that it has become difficult to disentangle a Sri Lankan sociology from Sinhala nationalism, leaving the debate on “indigenizing” sociology in Sri Lanka tied up in polemic. Both a subordinate position in colonial and imperial knowledge systems as well as the legacies of that position in contemporary nationalisms thus shape and contain the possibilities for sociology in South Asia. Given this broad and tentative outline of the dynamics constraining the production of sociology on South Asia in the U.S. and South Asia, we dig deeper to uncover some of the theoretical and historical processes that have led to these particular tendencies, as well as the countervailing trends that have emerged alongside those dominant modes.

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Hegemonic and Counterhegemonic Positions: The Study of South Asia in the U.S. The preponderance of additive and reductive approaches in U.S. sociology has emerged in part due to a legacy of specific European understandings of the subcontinent that were then layered with Parsonian presumptions of structural functionalism in the post-WWII era. During a time when modernization theory came to exercise what Manu Goswami has termed a “transdisciplinary hegemony” that started with sociology, previously colonized areas of the world were viewed as simply more grist for the mill of comparative scholarship, with the “modern ‘West’” as the taken-forgranted reference point (Goswami 2013, 151). While Max Weber viewed Hinduism and other Asian religions as providing a worldview and orientation incommensurate with capitalist modernity, the search for an Asian or Indian “Protestant Ethic” was widespread. The prevalence of structural functionalism within these debates meant that scholars located in the U.S. and Europe were mainly concerned with understanding how the abstract features of Hinduism structure the path to modernity for India and other Asian countries. How deterministic was that structure? Could it be applied to all people of the subcontinent? How did religious worldviews shape individual orientations toward thrift, saving, and self-betterment? Detractors from this orthodoxy, such as Milton Singer, advanced the radical idea that perhaps the lines between religion and individual action could not be so readily drawn and that social context mattered (Singer 1966). Nonetheless, other prominent scholars of India accused Singer of adhering too closely to a Parsons-derived version of Weber that neglected the implications of a cyclical cosmology, as opposed to the European linear one (Kantowsky 1982; Singer 1985). Weber’s understanding of India was thus a topic of extensive debate among scholars of the subcontinent in the U.S. and Europe in the mid-late twentieth century. These debates did not fundamentally challenge the atavistic view of the South Asian region in relation to the U.S. but rather found ways to explain it, using European religion, economy, and society as a central reference point. While the details of religious scripture or belief mattered to some extent, social theory in relation to Indian society mainly reflected upon whether it fit in (or didn’t) in relation to existing models of European history. These early debates set forth the conceptual path that we today experience in the taken-for-granted additive and reductive approaches to the

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region, designated in these early writings as “India” or “Hindu society.” Scholars cared about the region because of the conviction that they needed to know about the region in order to have a complete understanding of the world, and on the other hand, they hoped to extend knowledge of one atavistic society to another. Perhaps, the reasoning went, if we can understand Hindu society, then we can apply a theory of how religion, for instance, structures economy and society, to other parts of the world that lie outside of capitalist modernity. As Goswami put it, “It was almost as if the import of the political revolution wrought by decolonization … was simply to increase the empire of comparison for social science” (2013, 151). The purpose of this knowledge was for the production of a universalized knowledge-from-nowhere, rather than knowledge for the purpose of uncovering the dynamics of power and oppression. While the most obvious versions of this type of thinking are limited in current mainstream U.S. sociology, scholars continue to approach South Asia with an inherited temporalized logic, wherein specific places in the region are simply examples of the “global South” that demonstrate characteristics of variations to Eurocentric models or theories. Further, in conflating the subcontinent with Hindu society, these formative social scientific explorations continued a pattern of erasing Muslim, Dalit, and indigenous South Asian social locations that haunts contemporary sociology. These dominant modes of theorizing did not prevent other sociological pathways for engagement in the subcontinent. Marxist traditions of political economy have long influenced various sociological subfields and advanced the notion of an interconnected global system based upon the exploitation of labor and resources from the most marginalized groups in those parts of the world with histories of colonialism. As Andre Gunder Frank (1966) claimed, launching the influential school of thinking known as dependency theory, the colonized parts of the world were deeply integrated into the modern capitalist system, in a subordinate, “peripheral” position crucial to the operation of the “core.” Immanuel Wallerstein, considered by many to be the originator of comparative and historical sociology, had long argued that the modern capitalist system was born out of patterns of interdependency and exploitation between colonizing and colonized nations (Wallerstein 1979). From his work, numerous areas of study, such as the three-decade-old study of commodity chains and the growing literature on land dispossession, have taken as their basis that what we consider to be the “global South” lies at the center—not at the periphery—of the global capitalist system (Gereffi and Korzeniewicz

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1994; Bair 2005; Dunaway 2014). These frameworks helped scholars of South Asia to think about interlocking patterns of inequality and dependency not only between countries that have historically experienced a colonizer/colonized relationship, but also between dominant and subordinate groups within countries and regions. Because these concepts aimed to uncover power dynamics with an agenda (albeit often hidden) for social transformation, they paved the way toward contemporary thinking about decolonization of the discipline and played a constitutive role in our own training on South Asia. One area in U.S. sociology that has offered a rich site of engagement for work on South Asia is the scholarship on gender and globalization. Feminist scholars who came from varied disciplinary backgrounds all engaged with global issues by studying those women whose lives were most directly affected by those processes but who sociologists and world-­ systems theorists tended to regard as abstractions.2 These studies paid close attention to local histories and material conditions while also challenging taken-for-granted assumptions about gendered sites of oppression, and considered gender as a “verb” that shaped every aspect of labor and economy (Salzinger 2003). Transnational feminist scholarship offered a critical eye on how development efforts and Western feminism reproduced transnational power relations and global capitalist and securitized regimes (Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Kim-Puri 2005). Scholars in this emergent tradition thought critically about how politics is gendered through global, regional, and local political formations, and challenged uncritical assumptions about what the Third World feminist should look like, situating concepts like “agency” and “freedom” historically and politically. Sociologists of postcolonial sexuality, in conversation with queer scholarship and activism, theorized the state and the nation through the lens of sexuality and queer politics.3 This transnational feminist sociology, enriched by its engagement with Black, indigenous, and women of color feminist traditions within the U.S., crafted a mode of analysis anchored in concrete realities but situated within 2  Studies by scholars such as Aihwa Ong (1987), Maria Mies (1982), Caitrin Lynch (2007), Leela Fernandes (1997), and Leslie Salzinger (2003) are among those who developed this perspective. 3  Scholars like Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1988, 2003), Inderpal Grewal (1996), Richa Nagar (Collective and Nagar 2006), Naila Kabeer (2000), Raka Ray (1999), Saba Mahmood (2004), M.  Jacqui Alexander (2005), Millie Thayer (2009), Paola Bacchetta (1999), and Jyoti Puri (2002, 2016) exemplify this tradition.

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global power relations, attentive to the intersections and mutual constitutions of various dynamics and axes of difference and oppression, and reflexive about the stakes and ethical implications of our work. Feminist ethnographies also privileged a particular methodology—one that valued relationships of reciprocity at sites of research, in-depth knowledge of language and systems of meaning, and attention to everyday forms of resistance. For those of us forging a feminist pathway to conduct research in specifically South Asian contexts, this reflexivity was particularly resonant. A point of theoretical tension that arises in both dominant and counterhegemonic traditions in U.S. sociology has to do with the uniqueness of the subcontinent and the implications of that uniqueness for theory-­ building. The view that the subcontinent was fundamentally bound by culture and thus, inherently incompatible with modernity, rendered the region a unique place outside of the social, economic, and political processes that comprise history. Not only did this mean that the region was incompatible with Western understandings of modernization, it also meant that scholars did not find the region to be a site at which social theory could be created. Rather, social theory was created in Europe and the U.S. and empirical data could be collected in the subcontinent to support or elaborate upon those theories. Placing the region in the margins of history converged with the understanding that the societies of South Asia were unique and thus inconsequential to universalizable sociological knowledge. Thus, the only way to “include” scholarship on South Asia in social science was to think of it as peripheral—either adding to our knowledge or as an example of the category of “other” with the U.S. and Europe remaining the implicit or explicit referents. This view merged, often in surprising and contradictory ways, with the praxis of sociology in South Asia as the founders of new national sociologies started to forge an “indigenous” sociology. Within South Asia, these questions of what it meant to decolonize sociology generated active debate from the very start. Independent Nations, Dependent Social Science? Doing Social Science in the Subcontinent For the countries of South Asia, sociological questions were informed by broader epistemological questions about the nation-state and its position within the transnational sphere of knowledge production. What did it mean for a decolonizing nation to produce social science? To what extent could sociology draw on theoretical concepts and methods developed in

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the context of European industrialization? To what extent might there exist an “Indian” sociology? A “Nepali” sociology? And how were the tasks of these national sociologies distinct from those of Europe and the West? M.N. Srinivas and M.N. Panini (1973, 207) wrote, “Sociology has to go native if it has to be creative.” But what did “going native” mean for “native” sociologists—was a native sociologist even possible? These debates reveal the tensions of, as our contributor Fauzia Husain puts it, the “two-boat” dilemma of empirical sociology in the name of a “foreign science.” The first formal sociology courses in South Asia were offered in India in the 1910s (Srinivas and Panini 1973, 187). Before independence, sociology had mainly been a tool of colonial administration. However, sociology also provided key lenses for nationalist articulations and reform movements. For example, B.R. Ambedkar, the revered Dalit leader, philosopher, social scientist, and architect of the Indian Constitution, received early training in economics, sociology, history, anthropology, and philosophy at the University of Bombay and later Columbia University. His influential 1916 paper “Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis, and Development” developed a theory of caste as based on endogamy, and refuted British and French ethnographers of India as well as comparisons to race in the U.S., laying the groundwork for later theorists of brahminical patriarchy (Ambedkar 2013; Chakravarti 2003; Arya and Rathore 2019). After independence, professional sociology in India offered a utopian vision for the new nation. In the founding issue of the Indian journal Sociological Bulletin, D.P.  Mukerji (1952, 19) linked the formation of sociology to the emergence of the modern nation. “Sociology begins when the Community ends and the Society emerges,” he wrote, “and that is what is happening in India.” Mukerji argued that India’s nationalist movement had been “political, that is non-social, non-cultural and non-­ economic” and thus incomplete: only a serious engagement with sociology could enable the necessary social transformations that would accompany the political transfer of power. “The historical problems of India,” Mukerji argued, “are intrinsically sociological” (Mukerji 1952, 23). But if Mukerji’s sociology promised social reform, other strands of sociology sought to uncover Indian society’s fundamental, timeless characteristics, its essential sociological features. Drawing from Orientalist traditions, Sujata Patel argues, G.S.  Ghurye, the “father” of Indian sociology, saw sociology’s task as one of elucidating the essential characteristics of Hindu civilization (Patel 2013, 114). A similar position played out in India’s

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other major sociological journal, Contributions to Indian Sociology. Founded by European sociologists Louis Dumont and David Pocock in 1957, the journal aimed to draw out the essential characteristics of “Indian” social organization, but as viewed from a distance. Several other sociologists took issue with the project. F.G.  Bailey argued that India could not be defined by a unified set of beliefs or practices. J.P.S. Uberoi argued that sociology’s task in an emerging nation must be to take on projects of social reform specific to a decolonized country and must be thus fundamentally different from the task of elucidating an essentially Indian social reality. Many Indian sociologists refused to participate in the Contributions to Indian Sociology project at all, and the journal eventually disbanded in 1966, re-opening in 1967 under the leadership of T.N.  Madan, who had been critical of Dumont and Pocock’s project (Banerjee 2021). These debates emerged within the context of material and institutional constraints shaped by South Asia’s position in the world order. The first department of sociology in Pakistan was formed in 1955 and was largely shaped by U.S. strategic concerns—most of the sociologists in Pakistan were U.S. trained, funded by the U.S.  Agency for International Development (USAID) (Gardezi 2003, 103). Gardezi (2003, 104) argues that this U.S. influence produced a sociology that was largely “ahistorical, eclectic, and narrowly empirical,” preoccupied with testing U.S. theories and studying U.S. textbooks. In East Pakistan, UNESCO funded the first sociology department in 1957 and contended with similar constraints: an imported sociological tradition, little room to reimagine theory, and lack of facilities (Islam and Islam 1997, 2005). Islam and Islam (2005, 376, 392) argue that sociology in independent Bangladesh would become largely dominated by a “rentier class” focused on the status and social mobility the university offered, but unable to produce a “discourse of emancipation.” After the 1960s, U.S. sociology became increasingly influential in Indian sociology as opposed to British and French sociology (Srinivas and Panini 1973, 206). One particular manifestation of U.S. strategic interests in this same period was the predominance of the famous “village studies” conducted in the structural-functionalist tradition. In India, studies of villages were funded by the Ford Foundation, as part of its global effort to counter communism with democratic values (Sunil 2013; Srinivas and Panini 1973). In Nepal, the British Council funded the first sociological research through the Village Development Training Center in 1953, but

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the discipline began to develop within universities only in the 1970s, influenced both by Indian and British sociology (Bhandari 1990). Village studies reproduced an ahistorical understanding of Nepali society, unable to engage with politics and social conflict; Mishra (2005, 105) notes the preponderance of village studies on the Chinese border, where funders were particularly interested in understanding village life as a counter to the threat of Maoism. In Bangladesh, the Academy for Rural Development, founded in 1959, played a similar role, producing descriptive studies of rural life (S. A. Islam and Islam 2005, 380). Sociology was introduced in Sri Lanka in 1949 and largely focused on caste and rural life through the Village Studies Programme (Perera 2005, 329), only later beginning to take on nationalism and ethnic conflict. As sociology worked in service of U.S. anti-communism, it also worked in service of state-led development. Mishra (2005, 99) points to the “statist, modernist, developmentalist interests” of Nepali sociology in its early formation, and the dominance of “urban, and upper class, and upper caste” sociologists. In India, in the 1950s and 1960s, social scientists, particularly economists, played a central role in state-led development and large-scale economic planning. The Indian Council for Social Science Research, founded in 1969 as an autonomous but state-funded apex body for Indian social science research, successfully advocated for the importance of social science research to state governments, allowing for a range of sociological research to take place (Chatterjee 2002). By the 1980s, however, the decline of state-led developmentalism— and the neoliberalization of development—meant a concomitant reduction in the possibilities for social science research. In 2002, researchers from an SSRC-funded study in the U.S. found that social science researchers across South Asia complained of a “dilemma of sponsored research”— increasingly, research projects were funded by Western development donors and NGOs, limiting the possibilities for theoretical innovation, original topics, or transformative ideas (Chatterjee 2002). If the problem felt urgent for Indian sociologists, it felt even more so for sociologists in Nepal, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, who found that the majority of sociological research was funded by NGOs. These institutional conditions again point to the geopolitics of sociological knowledge production. On the one hand, Chatterjee (2002) explains, sociologists argued that their engagements with NGOs and social movements might make them more relevant, more engaged in the practical concerns of a developing nation. On the other hand, this divide left theory to be produced in the “first world,”

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while South Asian sociologists simply “applied” those theories to their contexts. Under these conditions, students tended to leave for Europe and North America to study sociology and not come back. The sociologist Satish Deshpande, commenting on the same SSRC study, noted that “social science research is a largely offshore venture dependent on the changing agendas of global institutions even when local personnel are also involved to a greater or lesser degree” (Deshpande 2002, 3629). The tensions of decolonization, then, moved beyond correcting for a “neglect” of the global South or of South Asian topics—it meant reckoning with the fact that sociologists within South Asia, even if they wanted to claim sociology as a route to imagining a more just society, were constrained by ideological and epistemological agendas set in Europe and North America, and overlooked within larger circuits of knowledge production. One example is the kinds of topics considered relevant for sociologists to take on, and the terms in which those topics are rendered legible. In Pakistan, for example, Shah et al. (2005) note that the sociology of women garnered the most publications in their study of Pakistani sociology journals, perhaps reflecting a longstanding UNESCO interest in funding studies on women and children in Pakistan (Gardezi 2003, 111). A European and U.S. preoccupation with the freedom of Muslim women creates a fraught terrain for the contemporary sociology of gender in Pakistan. Nida Kirmani (2020), for example, points out that a preoccupation with Pakistani cities as only sites of violence and abuse for women precludes the possibility of imagining pleasure or fun for women, a possibility scholarship tends to offer only to cities in the global North. In a volume commemorating the 50th anniversary of the re-founding of Contributions to Indian Sociology, the editors point to the inability of U.S. and European sociology to engage seriously with the methodological and theoretical contributions of Indian sociologists without reducing it to “theory from the global South.” “The worlding of Indian sociology,” they noted, “remains an unfinished, or perhaps uninitiated, discussion” (Srivastava et al. 2018, xxiv).

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Inequalities and Conflicts in South Asian Sociologies But even as South Asian sociologists have grappled with their relationship to Western social science, the binary of North and South is not the only relevant tension shaping the production of South Asian sociology. Decolonization also involves confronting the inequalities of knowledge production within South Asia. For example, one review essay points to the lack of “Nepali character” in Nepali sociology, and the predominance of textbooks in either English or Hindi (Bhandari 1990, 17). Several shifts in sociological thinking suggest challenges to these dynamics: a turn away from the instrumental focus on nation-building; a critical questioning of concepts such as village, caste, and religious community; a turn to new topics, such as urban life, the intersections of caste and class, kinship, disability, queer intimacy, and gender; increased interdisciplinarity and public engagement; and a continued commitment to rigorous methodology (Srivastava et al. 2018, xvii). For example, scholars have long pointed out the exclusion of Dalit and Adivasi lenses in the intellectual content and the institutional structure of Indian sociology; within this structure, institutional gatekeepers engage with Dalit scholars when they produce empirical research, but not theoretical contributions (Guru 2002; Kumar 2016). These caste erasures are reproduced through diasporic circuits, as migration patterns to the U.S. and European academy privilege dominant-caste researchers and perspectives, and those from India as opposed to other countries in South Asia. This decolonization project is both a challenge to the orientalist and Cold War U.S. sociological traditions that imagined “India” and later “South Asia” as a unified, stable social whole, and to the sociological work produced within South Asia that avoided taking on caste and class inequality head on, and ultimately worked to naturalize hierarchy and domination. The work of decolonizing sociology is not a recent development: it has played out through ongoing efforts to name and confront caste privilege in sociological knowledge production. One of the most prominent figures in the development of Indian sociology, for example, was M.N. Srinivas, whose influential studies of a Mysore village solidified the discipline’s orientation to an “indigenous” sociology, one attuned to Indian realities. Drawing on the structural-functionalist tradition of G.S.  Ghurye and Evans-Pritchard, Srinivas studied caste as a uniquely Indian system of

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organizing social relations at the level of the village, and brahminical values as dominant and desirable for lower castes. But Srinivas was not the only producer of Indian sociology in this period, and he was also the subject of critique. One important sociologist, C. Parvathamma, was the first Dalit woman sociologist in India and head of sociology at the University of Mysore. Trained in sociology by Max Gluckman in Manchester, Parvathamma studied caste and class dynamics in northern Karnataka villages, detailing dominant-caste violence and anti-­ brahminical movements (Indira 2018). Parvathamma challenged Srinivas’s analysis of the south Indian village with a call to situate the researcher’s standpoint. “Srinivas’s point of view is that of a south Indian Brahmin and it is important to understand how this influences his work,” she wrote (Parvathamma 1976, 92); “Whether it was Srinivas or the villagers who were obsessed with brahminical values is difficult to decide” (Parvathamma 1976, 94). She argued that Srinivas, because he was so invested in the stability and unity of the Indian village social structure, failed to acknowledge conflict, including both movements that aimed to challenge brahminical dominance as well as the complexities and interactions across different caste groups that made the primacy of brahminical values empirically variable. She linked Srinivas’s perspective to his European training, as well as to his brahminical origins: “he sounds more foreign even than some foreigners in an Indian village. Could this be attributed to his short stay in Oxford and perhaps his unconscious admiration for British or Western scholars, teachers, and friends?” (Parvathamma 1976, 94). She challenged Srinivas’s failure to recognize what might now be called intersectionality: he ignored, she argued, the fact that non-Brahmin women also faced strictures on chastity and segregation within their own patrilineal systems (Parvathamma 1976, 92). Parvathamma’s critique emphasized the fact that Srinivas’s analysis of the Indian village was in fact a distinctly brahmin one, informed by a Durkheimian insistence on finding stability where in fact there lay the potential for conflict and protest. And she insisted that the project of an “indigenous” or Indian sociology was a fraught enterprise that demanded more than replacing European analyses of Indian social systems with brahmin ones. These countervailing strands of “Indian” sociology push us to contextualize ourselves even as we contextualize the places and people we study. Acknowledging brahmin dominance and seeking to center the voices of those who are most marginalized at the sites we wish to study improves our sociology. To begin this process, we must grapple with our own

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identities as privileged diasporic researchers who find ourselves caught between hegemonic sites of intellectual production in North America and privileged class and caste positions in the subcontinent.

The Diasporic Researcher This volume confronts the ambivalent conditions of studying South Asia as diasporic subjects. It began with a conference in Boston, and this geographic positioning forms the backdrop to the particular set of perspectives and topics our volume addresses. But our genealogy of the sociology of South Asia suggests that these tensions are not unique to our location in the U.S., though they manifest in particular ways here. Regardless of the location of its production, sociological scholarship on South Asia grapples with the geopolitics of knowledge production, the dominance of European and North American social theory and their concepts and categories, and the role of foreign funding. It also contends with inequalities of caste, gender, class, and sexuality. Producing sociology on and from South Asia from a diasporic position offers the privilege of distance as well as the anxiety of absence. In some ways, it can reproduce the inequalities of global knowledge production that privilege perspectives on South Asia produced outside of it. In other cases, it can offer political connection and the possibility for intellectual creativity; for example, diasporic circuits have sometimes afforded a space for academics to more directly challenge oppressions at home and build new creative communities. These intellectual navigations reflect the larger political context of South Asian diasporas, within which class, caste, and religious dynamics are sometimes amplified. For example, Hindu nationalist organizations in the U.S. claim to represent “Indian American” identity, even as secular, Dalit, Christian, and Muslim South Asian coalitions counter their claims with more pluralist visions (Kurien 2003). A diasporic location can also afford space for new solidarities, such as the longstanding link between Black liberation movements in the U.S. and Dalit movements in India, and Black feminist and Dalit feminist thought in particular (Paik 2014). Each chapter of our volume addresses in some way the challenges of working within this diasporic circuit. Fauzia Husain’s chapter takes it on most directly, in wrestling with the forms of “betrayal” involved in writing about purdah practices for a North American feminist academic audience. In reimagining purdah as a strategic form of concealment and revelation

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that allows her to navigate her “two-boat dilemma,” Husain crafts a uniquely diasporic intellectual position, and demonstrates how it emerges through the embodied practice of fieldwork. Prashanth Kuganathan’s chapter details how being a man and a Vellalar researcher from the diaspora limited his ability to ask direct questions about caste or gender, even as his language abilities and ancestry allowed him access and familiarity. Umair Javed found that doing research in a Lahore marketplace required him to navigate, as he put it, his role as an “outsider”—a “suburban, somewhat-Anglicized, white-collar individual who was at odds with the material and cultural formation of inner-city commercial spaces.” In Poulami Roychowdhury’s ethnographic research in Kolkata, her interlocutor Kamal’s insistence on “loudly proclaiming” her last name, her upper-­ caste background, her credentials and her connections becomes a starting point for understanding the forms of social capital brokers seek out within the domestic violence field. By critically situating our own positionalities as researchers, we regard the diasporic condition as a fraught but central feature of the sociology of South Asia we are engaged in producing.

Toward a Sociology of South Asia: Charting the Path The chapters in this volume seek to fulfill the promise of a “connected” global sociology attentive to history and biography in equal measure (Mills 1959). They deeply contextualize everyday social phenomena by connecting to the historical and the global in order to understand the histories of the social structures that constrain and motivate us as individuals. Each chapter of this book reveals engagements with North American and South Asian sociological debates, fulfilling the promise of a “connected” sociology (Bhambra 2014). More specifically, the contributors to this volume each grapple with the tensions of working across North American and South Asian academic worlds, within transnational circuits that are limited by class and dominant-caste frameworks and inequalities that span the global, regional, and local. In calling for a more anti-­ imperialist strand of sociology as a basis for our volume, we depart from the additive and reductive approaches prevalent in our discipline to suggest that a sociology of South Asia consider, in the tradition of DuBoisian sociology, the “relations between the global characteristics of racial and colonial capitalism and its local concrete manifestations” (Itzigsohn and

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Brown 2020, 95) whether in the realm of politics, of labor, or the family. We need not simply replace “Western” concepts with “indigenous” ones, or, at the other extreme, demonstrate how South Asian contexts offer an idiosyncratic deviation from a (white, western) mainstream. This broad mandate for sociological work is particularly complex when conducting empirical work on any contemporary phenomenon in South Asia. The question of which history is relevant to the empirical phenomena at hand involves consideration of the interconnected legacies of the colonial and postcolonial state and the longstanding religious and cultural formations that start before colonialism and extend into the present. When we study any empirical phenomenon in South Asia, we must consider how the vestiges of colonial and postcolonial policies impact the object of study at every moment, while also considering the imperial and colonial histories of the very categories we study. A study of women’s empowerment NGOs, for example, cannot simply consider the NGO and its immediate context or even the history of NGOs in India or more broadly. Such a study necessarily engages complex histories of development that have a global genealogy and reflects the decline of the poverty-­ alleviating developmentalist state in India, as well as the rise of women’s empowerment discourses in India and around the world. Moreover, the categories of development, gender, caste, class, and empowerment must also be interrogated, always in terms of both their local and global histories (Sharma 2008). This demanding, multi-layered contextualization departs significantly from mainstream U.S. sociology’s often ahistorical handling of taken-for-granted social structures, such as race, class, and gender, and an often narrow interpretation of policy histories and regional variation, usually excluding consideration of the long arc of U.S. imperialism. Empirical sociologies of South Asia thus expose the reality that any task of historicization is also a task of theory; we seek to understand complicated legacies of specific policies, social movements, changing social structures as well as the institutions that aim to shape social life. This type of contextualization requires us to engage with sources that are cited less often in mainstream U.S. sociology journals and in so doing, understand the context of South Asia as not just a site of empirical data collection, but as a legitimate context from which sociologists generate social theory. The subtitle of our book Postcolonial Legacies, Global Imaginaries thus suggests a set of conceptual guidelines for sociological work centering South Asia that is reflected in all the chapters collected here. These two

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interrelated concepts link the complexity of navigating colonial and postcolonial legacies in the context of the ongoing material and symbolic influence of transnational and global meanings of modernity, belonging, and identity. Most works in this volume also integrate and interrogate transnational and global flows of capital, labor, commodities, and ideas in order to interpret what appear to be “local” phenomena. Extending traditions of global ethnography, sociologists of South Asia forge linkages between the everyday experiences of especially marginalized groups in the subcontinent with the broader processes that constitute globalization. As described above, we interpret “global imaginaries” in a second sense as well here, one that is even more specific to the South Asian context. We challenge methodological nationalism as well as the fixity of the region designated as “South Asia,” an outcome of Cold War policies, so our chapters consider social and geographic locations within South Asia as well as tracing diasporic mediations through Ethiopia and the U.S. Because all of the chapters in this volume engage what we consider this kind of feminist and decolonial orientation, we purposefully do not separate out in the volume a particular section dedicated to “gender and sexuality.” Furthermore, we include authors at various stages in their academic careers in order to ensure this collection can be as holistic and contemporary as possible. With these overarching themes in mind, we have organized the chapters in this volume not by topic or by subfield, but by which aspect of a transnational sociology centered in South Asia they most engage with. We have divided the chapters into three sections: State-Led Modernization Projects, Diasporic Mediations, and Place-Making/Identity-Making.

Overview of Chapters Our first section, State-Led Modernization Projects, draws together studies of how South Asian states have led projects of development at multiple scales and with diverse symbolic and political influences. These development projects aim to lead the nation-states of South Asia forward into modernity, from the presumed backwardness of their colonized pasts. As these chapters show, however, neither the histories nor future trajectories of such projects can be taken for granted. Not only do they get articulated in fraught matrices of caste, gender, class, and an urban-rural divide, they also bump up against competing understandings of modernity and progress. Poulami Roychowdhury’s chapter on patterns of brokerage in the “business” of women’s rights reveals the relevance of situated

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ethnography to understanding the relationship between the state and its citizens. Roychowdhury shows that, rather than an abstracted ideology, it is concrete strategies of capital accumulation that guide brokers’ actions. Beth Prosnitz’s study of women’s engagements with land in the Saptari district of Nepal challenge taken-for-granted understandings of how land reform policies meant to foster women’s land ownership are used by women meant to benefit from them. Prosnitz’s work reminds us of the importance of land and its commercial exchange in the everyday lives of women from varied class backgrounds, as well as how deeply legal claims and commercial deals are connected to abiding patriarchal family and caste structures. Smriti Upadhyay’s historical analysis of the labor union of the Hindu right, the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS), reveals how crucial opposition to communism and left-wing politics have been for the consolidation of right-wing political power in India. Upadhyay illuminates the class fissures and competing political ideologies that have been absorbed into Hindu right-wing hegemony, creating a potential organizational and political crisis in the current moment. Finally in this section, Chaitanya Lakkimsetti takes on the binaries of tradition and modernity that surface in unexpected formations in popular debates about gender and sexuality. The ideologies of dominant right-wing Hindutva political parties and the legal traditions of the courts both come into focus as Lakkimsetti analyzes media accounts, activist discourses, and legal documents to highlight struggles over sexuality and gender in India. Our next section, Diasporic Mediations, brings together studies that center diasporic subjects in making meaning and belonging in the subcontinent and beyond. This section brings the diasporic condition from the margins to the center of our sociological knowledge about South Asia. Fauzia Husain’s chapter offers a moving ethnographic reflection on the betrayals inherent in ethnography as a “native” engaged in a Western sociological milieu. In her candid account of failure and betrayal in the field, Husain captures the tensions of “returning home” for ethnographic research, and reporting on it for a “foreign science”—a tension that runs through many of the other chapters in the volume. Manjusha Nair’s study offers us an expansive look at new formations of “global” Indian capital. Nair pays attention to how workers and managers in an Indian denim textile factory in Ethiopia reimagine developmental and racialized hierarchies on the shop floor, combining paternalistic kinship with nostalgic visions of Third World solidarity. Finally in this section, Shruti Devgan examines the experiences of Sikh men in the diaspora who embrace visible

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markers of religious identification, especially keeping kes or uncut hair. Focusing on the “critical events” of 1984, when anti-Sikh violence engulfed India, and 9/11, when the backlash against the attacks on the World Trade Center made Sikh men targets for racist violence, Devgan develops a transnational understanding of racialization, rooted in a distinctive Sikh embodied identity. In the final section, Place-Making/Identity-Making, we feature rich ethnographic work that highlights how ordinary people in South Asia make sense of the globalized contexts in which they find themselves, in which they must grapple with the legacies of exclusionary histories. Prashanth Kuganathan’s study of caste in post-war Sri Lanka pushes against India-centric, colonial understandings of this regionally distinctive form of stratification. Focusing on the dynamism of caste structures, Kuganathan reveals how institutions, histories, and lived experiences of diverse caste groups in Jaffna render the temple a caste-making site, even in the wake of the anti-caste politics of the Tamil Tigers’ uprising. Sidra Kamran’s ethnography focuses on the integrated public and private aspects of women’s work in the service workplaces of Karachi. Centering the agency and experience of women workers who carve out space and time for fun, relationships, and mobility, Kamran challenges taken-for-granted distinctions between spaces presumed to be private or public, emphasizing their ongoing mutual construction. Indulata Prasad’s mapping exercises with marginalized Bhuiyan Dalit women in rural Bihar illuminate the persistence of spatial segregation and social stigma experienced by Dalit communities, but also the impressive gains made by the Bodhgaya Land Movement. Prasad’s work, in conversation with Ambedkar as well as with Black feminists and feminist geographers, reminds us of how spatial practices remain a powerful tool of marginalization. Umair Javed’s ethnography of the Shah Alam marketplace in Lahore reveals that religious revivalism, often misunderstood as a state-led project or an “essential” feature of Islamic societies, is produced and stabilized in and through relations of class and status among commercial traders and their workers. Jaita Talukdar concludes this section and the volume with an ethnography of contemporary bodybuilding practices in Kolkata. Focusing on the personal trainers who traverse both the worlds of the neighborhood gyms and American fitness culture, Talukdar problematizes prevailing understandings of neoliberalism as a cultural break from understandings of class and the body that came before. Trainers, she shows, keep local traditions of

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bodybuilding alive in their neighborhoods, even as they recruit younger bodybuilders into the American-style field of bodybuilding.

Conclusion The sociology of South Asia that we feature in this volume connects radical sociological traditions in U.S. sociology with parallel traditions in South Asia. The production of sociological work on South Asia has, from its inception, been structured by the subordinate position of the region in imperial and development hierarchies on one hand, and on the developmentalist focus of nation-state building on the other, but it has also been a site of vibrant debate about the meanings and practices of decolonization precisely because of this position. Rather than aiming to rid ourselves of these tensions, in this volume, we recognize them as a rich and necessary starting point. We attempt to build a space for knowledge production that centers the concerns of the most marginalized groups, who have experienced marginalization in the context of both global and national circuits of knowledge production. When we center the region of South Asia and the complex divisions within it, we engage in decolonizing the discipline of sociology by eschewing both additive and reductive approaches. We thus forsake the epistemological project of building a historical knowledge that claims to be universal—a view from everywhere and nowhere. We aim to generate theory from a vantage point that can be connected to sociologies in other parts of the world. In his relationship to Indian radicals in New York starting in the 1910s, Du Bois saw Indian anti-colonialism as linked to Black liberation. Tracing the connected histories of Black radicals and Indian anti-colonial nationalists in this period, Manan Desai writes that both groups “had either sought or seen in one another’s struggle an echo of their own” (Desai 2020, 147). In a process of “transnational refraction,” scholars engaged in transnational travels often reproduced the stability of oppositions between South Asia and the West, but also at times offered a vision of utopian solidarity, and of transformative social thought as key to achieving it. Our sociological project seeks to build on this tradition of transnational anti-­ imperial struggle and intellectual production, and connect with critical intellectual projects in the subcontinent and beyond. We hope that this volume helps to move the discipline toward producing knowledge that advances interconnected global projects of liberation for the most marginalized.

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PART I

State-Led Modernization Projects

CHAPTER 2

Between Women and the State: Rights Brokers and Capital Accumulation in West Bengal Poulami Roychowdhury

Diverse actors profess to help women experiencing violence in West Bengal, India. Members of women’s committees (mahila samiti), NGO caseworkers, housewives, politicians, union organizers, and even well-­ known criminals have been involved in the fray. They work as brokers, distributing information and resources to women who are unable, due to a lack of access and knowledge, to acquire such goods on their own (Stovel and Shaw 2012; Obstfeld et al. 2014; Burt 2005). Their brokerage services include everything from legal aid and counseling, financial assistance,

Thanks to Jennifer Bussell, Sarah Khan, Francesca Refsum Jensenius, Pavithra Suryanarayan, and members of the 2021 Gender & Politics in South Asia Workshop at UC Berkeley. A big thanks to the editors of this book for reviewing multiple drafts of this paper and providing such insightful comments.

P. Roychowdhury (*) McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Radhakrishnan, G. Vijayakumar (eds.), Sociology of South Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97030-7_2

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and medical care to muscle power and threats against abusers and law enforcement personnel. From Argentina, to Malawi, to South Africa, brokers have been shown to facilitate citizens’ interactions with neglectful, yet powerful states, helping people access everything from physical safety to developmental goods (Watkins et al. 2012; Holston 2008; Super 2016). Brokers work in a number of sectors in India, mediating between civilians and state bureaucracies in urban slums and rural areas where large numbers of poor and otherwise marginalized people lack access to government services (Anand 2017; Auerbach and Thachil 2018; Björkman 2015). The market for such services is large in India, because the State promises a range of goods that it does not grant in practice. The field of women’s rights epitomizes these contradictions. On paper, women enjoy a range of criminal and civil protections against domestic abuse. In practice, however, they find it extremely difficult to register reports, and very few cases lead to favorable judgments. Despite these hurdles, the promise of rights remains a powerful force in women’s lives. Survivors cannot rely on law enforcement personnel to protect them, yet they still need law enforcement personnel, no matter how negligent they might be, in order to lead safer lives. When law enforcement personnel do support women’s legal claims, or when they act informally on women’s behalf by threatening or scolding abusers, survivors have a better chance of leading safe lives (Roychowdhury 2021). As a result, survivors frequently look to others to facilitate their interactions with the State: those with expertise and political clout who can connect them to the police, protection officers, and court personnel. The people who brokered women’s rights comprised a motley group. They varied by age, gender, political affiliation, and outlook. Neither did they share a common ideology about women’s rights. Some brokers supported individual women’s claims while simultaneously expressing hostility toward women who pressed charges. Others agreed to help women in need while denying the idea that women were oppressed by men. So why did these actors intervene, supporting women’s claims against violence, despite their contradictory and at times hostile views of women’s rights? This chapter delves into rights brokers’ lives and motivations. It asks why people intervene on women’s behalf and traces the financial, cultural, and political forces that guide their actions. I draw on qualitative research, relying on interviews and two years of participant observation, to answer these questions. By talking to brokers and observing their actions, I

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realized that while they did not necessarily share a normative commitment to women’s rights, they did share a strategic orientation toward women’s legal engagements. Women’s rights, in other words, were not necessarily a social cause. They were primarily a business. Brokers profited from helping women, and the profit involved was sometimes, but not always, financial in nature. Brokers also acquired significant social, cultural, and symbolic resources through the work they did. Brokers were able to amass these resources because of the contradictory nature of the institution with which they interfaced: the criminal justice system. The criminal justice system was unreliable, but it also had the potential to distribute resources and rights. By mediating between women and law enforcement personnel, brokers expanded their own personal and professional networks, acquired expertise on the law and on legal institutions, developed a reputation for themselves as civic-minded people, and also supplemented their earnings through direct payments from women in need.

Rights as a Site of Capital Accumulation Literature in comparative politics documents the complex effects that brokers have on marginalized populations in the Global South. Across the Global South, brokers help poor people access basic goods and services, such as ration cards, electricity, housing, and water (Witsoe 2012; Holland and Palmer-Rubin 2015; Bowles et al. 2020). Simultaneously, they sometimes exacerbate existing social inequalities by selectively distributing resources to co-ethnics and suppressing democracy by organizing patronage around dominant political parties (Novaes 2018; Chandra 2007; Posner 2005). Because this work focuses on the effect brokers have on recipients, we know relatively little about the role brokerage plays in the lives of brokers themselves (Witsoe 2012; Novaes 2018; Holland and Palmer-Rubin 2015). Why do brokers do what they do? What do they hope to receive from their efforts? One possible way to answer these questions is to focus on norms—to argue that brokers are motivated by normative commitments to social causes, such as poverty alleviation or social justice. Perhaps civilian intervention against domestic violence signals a substantial consensus around women’s rights in West Bengal, and there is a widespread agreement that women should not be violated and deserve legal protections. The diversity

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of actors may further suggest that normative consensus cuts across demographic groups and political affiliation. While normative commitments may motivate some brokers to act, norms are unlikely to drive interventions against domestic violence in this context. Normative support for survivors is uneven in most parts of the world, and it is definitely so in West Bengal. Large-scale attitudinal surveys indicate that nearly half of respondents (both men and women) believe husbands are sometimes justified in beating their wives (International Institute for Population Sciences 2017). The image of the abused woman occupies a complicated place in Bengali culture. It evokes sympathy under certain circumstances, but this sympathy is limited and conditional (Sarkar 2001; Chatterjee 1999). It is limited in the sense that there is not much of it to be had, and it is conditioned on public assessments of a woman’s character, as well as social biases against women of particular demographic groups. When allegations of domestic abuse surface in a community, family members, friends, and neighbors wonder if the woman appropriately fulfilled her gendered duties (Roychowdhury 2021; Sen 2010). They demand to know if she cooked, cleaned, and properly cared for her family. They demand to know if victims were faithful to their husbands, and if a woman is unmarried and suffering abuse from natal kin, she receives sympathy if she is a good student and sexually chaste. Social evaluation of a victim’s character is not always based on the “evidence” of a woman’s conduct. Bystanders interpret women’s actions through classed and caste-based notions of decency (Agnes 2005; Kannabiran 2005). Hindu, upper-caste, middle-class women who are conventionally attractive, heterosexual, and not overly cosmopolitan are granted the benefit of the doubt. Women who fall outside of these social categories have a harder time convincing people of their respectability. Character assessments are further complicated by hegemonic definitions of wives and daughters as those who should withstand a certain amount of abuse for the sake of their families (Basu 2015). Women who complain can come under suspicion simply because they complained (Lodhia 2009). This complicated cultural terrain means that women experiencing violence cannot assume their experiences will evoke sympathy. Instead, they can expect that their own character and actions will be carefully scrutinized. It also means that they can access contingent spaces of compassion and support. But bystanders and kin may not rush to assist them out of some widespread sense that women are oppressed and deserve justice.

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Beyond a simple expression of ideological commitment to women’s rights, civilian intervention on behalf of women can also be interpreted as a business. Through the business of rights, rights brokers accrued four kinds of capital: economic, social, cultural, and symbolic (Bourdieu 1984, 2011; Steinmetz 2006). Economic capital came in the form of direct cash payments from women needing the brokers’ help and in the form of jobs in the non-profit sector managing legal cases. Social capital came in the form of networks with civilians, law enforcement personnel, and civil society organizations. Cultural capital appeared in the form of expertise: knowledge of the law and of criminal justice institutions. Finally, symbolic capital was available in the form of reputation: becoming known as someone who did good works. In the absence of ideological commitment, the possibility of these resources served as a powerful motivation for a range of people, because brokers lived and got by within a context where such resources were not only scarce but also highly unevenly distributed. Existing work on brokerage rarely discusses the classed and gendered reasons motivating brokers’ actions. Scholars focus on patronage networks stratified by social class, assuming that brokerage networks necessarily connect relatively elite men to underprivileged men (Rodrigo Zarazaga 2014; Larreguy et al. 2017). These studies sometimes use the gender-specific term “middlemen” without providing information on the gendered composition or gendered dynamics of who provides brokerage services (Spaan 1994; Corbridge et al. 2012; Salzman 1974; Jeffery and Basu 2012). But capital in all its forms is neither class nor gender neutral. Social networks, expertise, reputation, and money are not merely resources; they are gendered and classed resources. In India, economic elites and men monopolize these forms of capital, restricting access for disadvantaged groups. Women, poor people, those who live in villages, lower-caste people, and religious minorities (especially Muslims) possess relatively little social, cultural, symbolic, and economic capital compared to men of dominant class, religious, and caste backgrounds. Brokerage provided an opportunity for people who otherwise may not have been able to access such goods, specifically because brokers tended to be people who occupied a middle stratum of society. On the one hand, brokers had valuable local connections and could easily talk to and liaise with ordinary women. But, at the same time, they were not necessarily rich, elite, or well-­ educated. Many of them were women, some were religious minorities, and all of them appeared to lack key opportunities. Because brokers tended

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to be people who had experienced some kind of marginalization throughout their lives, brokerage provided an important (and at times the only) avenue for them to try to improve their circumstances.

Research Context Indian legislators have passed both criminal and civil reforms against domestic violence. In 1983, Section 498A of the Indian Penal Code criminalized “physical and emotional cruelty” within marriage.1 Available to both men and women who are married, Section 498A offers the promise of a fine and imprisonment if the perpetrator is convicted in court. In 2005, the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act (PWDVA) extended civil remedies to women in a range of domestic relationships, not just marriage. PWDVA recognizes physical, sexual, financial, verbal, and emotional abuse. It grants orders of protection, financial compensation, alimony, child custody, and residential rights. Despite the comprehensive nature of these legal reforms, rights are poorly administered.2 Women who approach the criminal justice system for assistance report feeling intimidated, neglected, or downright terrified for their safety. Law enforcement personnel routinely suppress charges, rebuke women for “complaining,” refuse to initiate mandatory procedures, leave investigations pending, and fail to enforce verdicts (Burton et al. 2000; Mahapatra 2014; LCWR 2013). By 2019, Section 498A had the lowest conviction rate of all crimes prosecuted under the Indian Penal Code. Only 15.9  percent of tried cases led to conviction, while a full 10.9 percent of tried cases were illegally “compromised” in an 1  Prior to IPC 498A, married women could seek limited remedies against domestic violence under matrimonial law. They could also use general criminal provisions against hurt, grievous hurt, and wrongful confinement. These days, women experiencing violence have a number of legal options. In addition to 498A and PWDVA, women have rights to alimony (maintenance) through CrPC 125. Those who face dowry-related harassment and abuse can also use the Dowry Prohibition Act. 2  Legal reforms have had one discernible positive effect: They have allowed women to make legal claims. Far greater numbers of women report domestic abuse in India today than they did in the past. Between 2007 and 2018, cases registered under criminal law increased by 38 percent, rising from 75,930 to 104,551. Women registered cases even as actual rates of violence decreased. In 2006, some 37.2  percent of surveyed women had experienced some form of domestic violence in their lifetime. By 2016, that average had fallen to 31 percent. For more, please refer to the National Crime Records Bureau Full Report 2017 and the National Family Health Survey 2015–2016.

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out-of-­court settlement. While PWDVA cases had a higher chance of leading to a court order than 498A, a mere 616 cases were registered countrywide (National Crime Records Bureau 2018). Noting the deadly consequences of this enforcement void, women’s rights activists and caseworkers have increasingly gotten involved in the nitty-gritty of case processing. They provide legal advice, accompany women to police stations and courts, pressure law enforcement personnel to register complaints, and form alliances with other civil society groups to advocate on women’s behalf. Their alliances have served to broaden the kinds of actors and organizations who get involved in individual incidents. NGOs that had nothing to do with women’s rights started providing counseling services (Ray 1999; Basu 1994). They exist in a crowded field with other organizations, including political parties such as the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)] and the Trinamool Party Congress (TMC), that have a record of intervening in domestic violence cases. For example, the CPI(M)’s women’s wing, the Paschim Banga Mahila Samiti, provides legal assistance and helps women register complaints. These organized activities accompany a proliferation of mediation services in villages and cities. Individuals without any formal organizational affiliation help women experiencing violence, including doctors, housewives, and even criminals. The fact that so many different kinds of people claim to assist women raises questions about intent and motivation, especially as many of them disavow feminism and critique women’s rights as inimical to traditional families. Members of political parties and criminals prove to be an especially unlikely set of helpers. Politicians and party workers frequently offer women help when they experience harassment or violence, yet the party system is heavily male dominated, patriarchal, and violent toward women (Kochanek and Hardgrave 2007). Members of political parties throughout India use sexual violence as a weapon to terrorize rivals, and a growing number of elected politicians are accused of rape and sexual harassment (Roychowdhury 2016; Vaishnav 2017). West Bengal is no exception to these country-wide trends. Similarly, most criminals are not sympathetic to women’s rights. And like some politicians, many are themselves perpetrators of gender violence. These actors are unlikely to help survivors of domestic abuse because of some special commitment they have to women’s rights. So, what motivates them to act?

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Data and Method The data for this paper comes from a larger project I conducted on how women claim rights against violence and with what consequences. This project involved two years of ethnographic observation and follow-up interviews with women, people who mediated on their behalf, and law enforcement personnel. In this chapter, I focus on the actions and motivations of one set of actors from this broader research: those who mediated between women and the criminal justice system. Qualitative studies as well as large-scale surveys indicate that women facing violence rarely approach the Indian criminal justice system alone (Burton et al. 2002; International Institute for Population Sciences 2017). Instead, domestic violence allegations are brought forward by a range of organizations and actors (Rao et al. 2000). I used a relatively simple heuristic to identify people who helped women experiencing violence: anybody who said they did. I did not question their tactics or impose my notion of what it means to mediate on the category. If they characterized themselves as doing this kind of work, and I could verify that they had mediated at least a handful of times, I asked them to join the study. The advantage of this recruitment strategy was that it allowed me to capture what is truly surprising about mediation in this context—that so many people with otherwise so little in common say that they are helping women. In studying brokers, I hoped to understand a few things: Who were they, and what motivated their interventions? How did they manage violence and why did women approach them for help? Given their social, professional, ideological, and methodological differences, why did they coalesce around women’s rights? To meet brokers, I first approached organizations that were reputed to help women: NGOs, mahila samiti, and labor unions. I used organizations to recruit participants both from the organization and learn about brokers who were either loosely affiliated with the organization or seen to be providing competing services. Additionally, my personal background eased access and entry into these sites. I was born in Kolkata and speak fluent Bengali. Linguistic and cultural fluency eased access and allowed me to interpret the complicated interactions I witnessed. I gained entry into two women’s NGOs, a peasant union that had its own women’s wing, and three mahila samiti. I also accessed political parties through family and friends who lived in the area and by accompanying women with

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complaints when they conversed with elected officials and political party workers. Through NGOs and mahila samiti, I sat in on intake sessions, followed brokers through their daily activities, monitoring cases, visiting women’s homes, and accompanying women to police stations and courts. I supplemented participant observation with twenty-six in-depth interviews. I used the interviews to gather information on participants’ perceptions and motivations and to talk to brokers who were difficult to access ethnographically. I interviewed seven NGO caseworkers, three mahila samiti organizers, four women’s rights activists, three people in management positions in women’s NGOs, two lawyers who also mediated on behalf of women outside their professional capacities, one homeopathic doctor, one self-described housewife, one well-known criminal, two elected officials, and two men who conducted “party work” (were affiliated with and campaigned for political parties). While conducting ethnography, I jotted notes in a small notebook. Later, at night, I wrote long form field notes, detailing the events of the day. Every three to four weeks, I consolidated field notes into theme-­ based memos, where I aimed to analyze data and identify trends. With interviews, I followed a similar system of analysis that relied on theme-­ based coding. All interviews were conducted in Bengali and recorded, lasting anywhere from thirty minutes to four hours. I later transcribed interviews myself, and the quotes that appear on these pages are my own Bengali to English translation. My gender and social background, or what researchers would call my position within the field, revealed a good deal about the cultural and practical dimensions of my research site. I recruited participants through organizations. I frequently interviewed women brokers in their homes, but never men. With men, I made sure to interview them in public spaces, such as an outdoor tea shop or an office. Both of these strategies aimed to prevent potential harassment that women researchers face while conducting ethnography in a wide array of research sites (Sharp and Kremer 2006; Hanson and Richards 2019). I worried about giving off the “wrong impression” because sexual propriety and respectability significantly informed people’s assessments of young women. The brokers I met, despite their work on abused women’s behalf, were by no means free of these biases. Brokers’ continued attention to gendered, and at times downright misogynist, ideas indicated that norms were complex and were by no means the primary motivation for the work they did.

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My social background was important in another way. I was relatively privileged compared to most of my research participants. Part of this privilege was shaped by geopolitical inequalities; I lived in the United States and attended an American university. Part of it was shaped by local class, religious, and caste inequalities; I came from an upper-middle-class, Hindu, upper-caste family. My position in the field helped me understand the importance of social and cultural capital at an embodied level. I frequently became a site for capital accumulation for the brokers I met. Brokers used my presence in their lives to enhance their own social standing and index their cultural achievements to other brokers, to their communities and peers, and to survivors who sought their assistance. In the rest of the chapter, I draw on interviews from my broader sample of brokers to discuss how they understand their work in relation to a powerful, yet negligent, state. I then use ethnography and interviews to focus on the lives of two brokers: Bulbul and Kamal. Their stories provide a detailed lens on brokers’ motivations, highlighting how brokers helped women while simultaneously espousing complicated and at times hostile attitudes toward women’s rights. Neither Bulbul nor Kamal felt all that committed to the concept of rights and in their separate ways occasionally blamed women for the abuse they had suffered. Yet, both of them had deliberately and energetically carved a space for themselves in the rights market because they each received something important from their work. For Bulbul, rights work helped her expand her social networks and provided the expertise on the law and legal institutions that she craved. For Kamal, helping women in need cemented a good reputation that he hoped to transform into a political career, and it provided access to the ready cash that he had in short supply. For analytic purposes, I have used each broker’s story to highlight distinct forms of capital accumulation. But the reader will be able to tell through the details that each form of capital was linked to all the others. Brokers, in other words, routinely acquired several forms of capital at the same time. And they actively worked to transform one form of capital into another, using their newfound expertise to enhance their political reputation and drawing on the social networks they had formed to access jobs in the formal sector.

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The Opportunity to Intervene Women experiencing violence referred to brokers through two common nouns: Dada (elder brother) and Didi (elder sister). Notably, Bengalis use these terms to address kin relations as well as members of the public sphere who are either older than them, wealthier than them, or in a position of relative authority. A didi can be an elder sister, an elderly woman on the bus, a rich neighbor, or a nurse at the hospital. Similarly, a dada can be an elder brother, the bus driver, your supervisor, a politician, or a thug. Dadas and didis espoused complex and contradictory ideologies about women’s rights and differed in their intervention methods. Some embraced a language of women’s empowerment and were concerned about protecting the vulnerable. Others did not appear to be motivated by issues of inequality or injustice at all. Others were openly hostile to discussions of women’s rights, decreeing them “foreign” transplants, lamenting the end of the Indian extended family, and reminiscing about “lost” traditions of tolerance and compassion. In terms of methods, some exclusively relied on legal measures, helping women register reports and accompanying them to courts. Others used various extra-legal tactics, such as pressuring the police to oversee illegal compromises and running community-based arbitrations. In terms of their social background, the twenty-six brokers I met all came from a middle-strata of society. They were neither extremely elite nor among the most marginalized. Their occupational backgrounds spoke to this middle status. Didis tended to be women who were connected to a mahila samiti or NGO, members of microfinance self-help groups, teachers, panchayat members (elected village council representatives), and those who had a record of voluntary public service. Meanwhile, dadas tended to be men who did “party work” (were affiliated with political parties), homeopathic doctors, teachers, union organizers, and gang leaders and petty criminals. Within this middle-strata, there was some internal diversity. Some brokers had attended college and came from middle- and lower-middle-class families. Others were barely literate, lower-caste, and financially insecure. Some lived and worked in the capital city of Kolkata and had connections to broader activist networks. Others spent their whole lives in villages and did not have meaningful social networks beyond their localities. Because of their location within this middle-strata, dadas and didis were able to liaise between diverse groups of people: survivors, abusers, families, communities, and law enforcement personnel.

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During my conversations with them, the brokers I met argued that the contradictory and uneven nature of the criminal justice system created a space for their daily interventions. All of them cited this opportunity when I asked them why they helped women. As a politician affiliated with the Congress party who lived in the city of Bardhaman—a tall, chain-smoking man in his early sixties—mentioned, “They came to me, that’s why I started. Maybe because I have a strong personality, they think I’ll speak on their behalf. I don’t know why they approached me. Anyway, where are they supposed to go? They have to go somewhere.” When I followed up with a seemingly innocuous question, asking why abused women did not go to the police, the politician looked at me as if I was a simpleton. “Police? Who goes to the police? Do you know a single girl who feels comfortable asking them for help?” Even though he had close friends and working relations with local law enforcement personnel, this particular broker articulated a common perception that the criminal justice system did not protect women’s interests. Someone else needed to step in and mediate on their behalf. A retired panchayat representative who lived in a village in South-24 Parganas district—a middle-aged woman in her fifties—agreed with the politician’s assessment. After leaving the panchayat, she had dedicated time to volunteer work, including helping women in abusive situations. She waved her hand dismissively when I asked if protection officers were a helpful resource for women in the countryside. “The PO is far away. How is a girl supposed to get from here to Alipore?” she asked. The district court in Kolkata, where the Protection Officer had an office, was twenty kilometers away. “These girls can’t even leave their homes,” she continued. “If they leave, they come outside for ten minutes. They tell someone to watch their children and they come outside to talk. They have all the household chores to do. The PO is completely useless to us here.” According to both the TMC politician in Bardhaman and the retired panchayat representative in South-24 Parganas, the criminal justice system housed significant barriers to women’s direct access. Be it the hostility and neglect of the police who were close by or the distance between protection officers and those they served, front-line state officials were inaccessible. Brokers believed these barriers created a space for third-party intervention. Abused women needed a go-between, someone who could advocate on their behalf, someone who could introduce them to the police station so they would be taken seriously or arrange a long-distance trip to the PO’s office.

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Given the image of the criminal justice system that brokers painted, one could rightfully wonder why they felt there was an opportunity to mediate at all. Why would anyone want an intermediary to help them encounter a criminal justice system that was so negligent? One mahila samiti coordinator, an energetic, wiry woman who had herself been in an abusive relationship and who now organized women in her neighborhood in south Kolkata, addressed the issue directly. “We [women] still need our problems fixed! Just because the police and PO don’t help doesn’t mean they never will help.” This particular broker firmly believed that the criminal justice system could be brokered and that ordinary citizens, including abused women, felt they had to appeal to the State for assistance when they were in trouble. Another broker, a one-time member of a women’s NGO and a former microfinance self-help group organizer for women in her village, echoed similar sentiments. “At some time or other, a girl may need the police on her side. We can run arbitrations all we like. But having the police there, getting the case registered, this gives a girl ammunition, you understand?” The criminal justice system, in other words, was distant, unhelpful, and hostile, but it was also necessary, powerful, and impossible to completely avoid. Women who could convince law enforcement to support their claims had a significant advantage over their abusers, and anybody who could help them achieve this feat was well remunerated. Brokerage enabled capital accumulation by allowing the broker to form a relationship with the site of “meta capital”: the State (Bourdieu 2011; Aretxaga 2003). By mediating between women and the criminal justice system, brokers amassed important social, cultural, symbolic, and political capital.

Networks and Expertise In her late thirties, with a round, friendly face, and a scratchy voice, Bulbul was a self-proclaimed housewife and mother.3 A practicing Christian from a lower-middle-class background, Bulbul had finished twelfth grade and then had an arranged marriage. She now lived in a small town located in South-24 Parganas district with her husband, mother-in-law, and two adolescent children. Family photographs lined the walls of her modest brick home. They jostled for space among an assortment of religious and 3  I have used pseudonyms throughout the chapter to ensure anonymity and protect research participants’ confidentiality.

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non-religious paraphernalia: a clay model of Jesus, a brightly colored calendar showing a chubby baby Krishna eating butter, a cuckoo clock, and a collection of plastic horses. We sipped chai and sat in the front room while she talked about her life. I was there to understand why she had entered a training program that would allow her to provide legal advice to women experiencing violence. A local women’s NGO ran the training program free of charge for aspiring caseworkers in the district. Bulbul quickly established herself as an outspoken and engaged trainee. Her commitment to what she termed “helping oppressed women” was evident throughout the program, but so was her ambivalence about the NGO’s rights-oriented approach and the training program’s theorization of gender inequality. On the one hand, she believed women needed to wage a “battle” against evil men. While she, herself, was Christian, she idolized the Hindu Goddess Durga, who carried ten weapons, rode a lion, and slayed male demons. On the other hand, she thought women were best served by reconciling with abusers. “Girls can’t live alone. It’s good for us to run a family,” she mentioned. And in order to achieve this goal, they had to “adjust” to the family’s situation. “No girl should be beaten,” she clarified. “But we all need to make small changes to make our homes a peaceful place.” Bulbul’s complicated, and at times contradictory, sentiments about the law and domestic violence overlay an equally complex understanding of women’s vulnerability and subjugation. She spoke with bitterness about how she was raised in a household where daughters were unwanted. Her own mother would feed the boys in the family first, leaving scraps for Bulbul and her sister. When Bulbul had complained, she was beaten. Given the chance to have her own family, Bulbul had wanted to do things differently. “I say to my son and daughter…you are the same to me. You will both eat the same thing and go to the same school.” Having experienced the disadvantages women and girls face firsthand, Bulbul worked hard to rectify those imbalances within her home and within her community. Even before joining the NGO training program, she had established a reputation for herself as someone who helped women in her town. Based on these experiences, Bulbul believed that certain kinds of women were more likely to be abused than others. She emphasized the role that social class played in women’s victimization, arguing that poverty made women more vulnerable to violence.

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Many girls are truly downtrodden. You should see the condition of girls from poor households. Their husbands all drink and hit them. The girls are the ones earning the money. The boys are completely useless. They just sit around. They don’t provide for their children… But I have to say, there are some girls who are very naughty. I have seen it with my own eyes. They are spoiled and think only about themselves. They make their husband’s life unbearable and then register 498a [the criminal law against domestic violence]. There are many households, wealthy households in Kolkata, that support their daughters’ mischievousness, you understand? Boys are not always to blame.

Large-scale surveys support Bulbul’s intuitions, indicating that women from low-income households are more likely to face physical violence than those who are wealthier (International Institute for Population Sciences 2017). But in the process of discussing poor women’s vulnerability, Bulbul also voiced a range of other sentiments that were far from egalitarian. For Bulbul, the problem that poor women faced partly had to do with physical violence. But part of the problem was their “useless” and alcoholic husbands, who failed to live up to traditional gender norms and financially provide for their families. In this statement and others, including when she proudly identified as a housewife and mother, Bulbul held up traditional gendered divisions of labor and ascribed to conservative norms about what men and women should do with their time. Similarly, while she expressed concern for women of disadvantaged social backgrounds, she made sure to distinguish the “truly downtrodden” from women who lied. She cast aspersions on the character of women who lived in cities and those from relatively privileged backgrounds. In her mind, these women could not be trusted when they brought forth allegations of abuse, because they were socialized to be self-centered and manipulative. She applied her biases to her personal life, mentioning her plans to arrange a marriage for her son to a “village” girl from a “simple” family. Both “village” and “simple” indicated women who were neither well-off nor cosmopolitan. When it came to introducing a bride into her own family, Bulbul calculated that the fewer advantages a woman had, the less likely she was to complain about her conditions. Bulbul hoped to protect her son (and potentially herself) from the very charges that she helped other women advance against their husbands and in-laws. How did Bulbul, with her complicated approach to gender and women’s rights and her ambivalence toward legal measures, find herself in a

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legal training program at an NGO that supported any woman that came to their doors, including potentially self-centered and mendacious city girls? And perhaps more to the point, why had Bulbul supported women who came to her for help with violence before joining the training program? Did she only help poor women? It was difficult for me to answer these questions until I understood what Bulbul gained from her interventions and why the gains mattered to her, personally: Both the informal activities in her town and the possibility of becoming an NGO caseworker helped Bulbul amass social and cultural capital. Social capital came in the form of networks: acquaintances, friendships, and working relationships with anyone and everyone who was involved in the claims making and claims resolution process. These networks included survivors, their families, women’s rights activists, NGO members, caseworkers, elected officials, lawyers, police officers, court personnel, protection officers, medical professionals, and social services. Each and every intervention Bulbul made into a woman’s life brought her into contact with some or all of the aforementioned individuals, leading her to know more people over time, to call more people her associates, and to put new people she met in touch with older contacts. Cultural capital came in the form of expertise: She knew the names and specificities of various legal statutes against violence, the intricacies of legal procedure, how to fill out forms, the phone numbers and offices of different state officials and non-state organizations, which buses and trains to take to go to each police station and court, and how to conduct oneself with confidence once inside these imposing edifices. By acting on women’s behalf and by completing a legal training course, Bulbul also came to know what others did not. This expertise was both valuable and hard to come by for a woman with a high-school education. Bulbul was proud to be known by others. “Everyone knows my name in this area.” Later in the conversation, she mentioned how, through her work, she had become someone people referred other people to go see. She was especially honored to receive referrals from politicians, elected officials, and law enforcement personnel, people who were positioned higher up in the social and political hierarchy than her. “These days, even the panchayat tells girls, ‘Go see Didi,’” Bulbul glowed with pride. She, after all, had all the right contacts. “I know the police, the party boys [referring to political party workers].” For Bulbul, cultivating a wide set of relationships was valuable in its own right; she derived pleasure from having a wide social circle.

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Aside from the simple pleasure she derived from knowing people, Bulbul also understood the utilitarian function of social networks. Knowing people allowed her to help women. “People won’t help you if they don’t know you,” she mentioned. During each intervention, she demonstrated her skill and efficacy by connecting women to NGOs, to doctors, to the party boys at the neighborhood political party headquarters, and to local law enforcement personnel. She could never have made these connections if she did not have personal contacts with each group. Thus, the work she did helped to expand her range of contacts, and those contacts in turn helped her get more work. Social networks also had a more personal, strategic utility for Bulbul. By getting to know politicians she hoped to advance her husband’s political ambitions. And, by working closely with rights activists and NGO caseworkers, she hoped someday to secure a paid job in the NGO sector for herself. She mobilized her contacts at every stage of an intervention, mentioning how her first task was to counsel women who approached her for help. She sometimes got her husband and son involved, telling them to urge abusive husbands, fathers, or brothers to change their behavior. If that did not work, she called on the party boys: men affiliated with the Trinamool Party Congress, the dominant political party in her town. “The party boys come and have tea with us,” she mentioned with an air of satisfaction. “I can call them, and they always help [with a case].” In the process of recounting how she used her social networks to help women, Bulbul appeared equally pleased by the success of her strategies and the fact that important people came to her house for tea. Bulbul insisted that she was not just known in the area—she was known as an expert in women’s matters. “Girls come to me with questions. They tell each other, ‘if you can’t understand something about your case, Didi will explain it to you.’” For Bulbul, being known was not simply about the social networks she formed but also about being known as a certain kind of person, a person who possessed deep and arcane knowledge about a tough subject: the law. It mattered to her that the knowledge she had accumulated through her work had to do with the law, a masculinized field that exerted power and respect. “Other women my age, they only want to talk about cooking or their children. I care about that, but I also have other interests. You understand, Poulami. You are doing so much to advance your education.” Bulbul was curious about my schooling and professional aspirations. She was happy to hear my parents supported my plans for higher education and asked for tips on how to help her daughter

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attend college. She sighed recalling her own lack of opportunities. “If I had been educated, I would have been a lawyer.” Bulbul asserted her growing expertise at every possible opportunity. She arrived early to the NGO training sessions so she could secure a seat at the front of the room near the blackboard. She raised her hand to answer every question and often went above and beyond what was necessary to cite her vast knowledge of the law. When the training session coordinator asked how the trainees would counsel a woman whose boyfriend was assaulting her, Bulbul shouted out, “The new law [PWDVA]! But, didi [the coordinator], it depends on what kind of abuse. She can also use criminal law for assault.” The coordinator nodded, commenting that PWDVA was sufficient. Some of the other trainees were impressed by Bulbul’s knowledge, while a few raised their eyebrows and complained that Bulbul liked to show off. Bulbul appeared unfazed by any criticism, glowing whenever she got the right answer and eagerly scribbling in her notepad throughout every session. I, myself, became part of her capital accumulation strategies. She enthusiastically paraded me around her town when I visited, introducing me as a “lawyer from America” to friends and acquaintances. The America part was accurate but the lawyer part was not, and she knew it. I had the sneaking suspicion that “lawyer” sounded impressive, and Bulbul was not about to let an opportunity pass to let people know that she was well connected. Once she completed the NGO training program and became an official caseworker, she incorporated me into her daily activities, urging me to accompany her to courts and police stations. She asked me to come because she wished to be helpful, but also because she hoped that the presence of an “American” would enhance her standing in the eyes of the State. The social and cultural benefits of brokerage for Bulbul were plainly visible when her ideological commitments came into conflict with rights work. A five-minute walk from Bulbul’s house lived a woman named Mishti who sought Bulbul’s help with her abusive husband. Mishti was wealthier than Bulbul and had spent part of her life in the capital city of Kolkata. With cropped hair, designer saris, and liner perpetually accentuating her large eyes, Mishti easily fit the trope of the urban, privileged women Bulbul ostensibly deplored. Mishti accused her husband of psychological abuse: hiding objects from her like her make-up, jewelry, and underwear to make her doubt herself. Bulbul was less than sympathetic to Mishti’s account. “She is completely crazy,” Bulbul told me in confidence.

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“She is an only child. Her parents give her everything she wants.” Bulbul intimated that Mishti was not abused—she was simply a spoiled and insane woman who did not know how to “adjust” to married life. While bad-mouthing Mishti behind her back, Bulbul counseled her at her home, detailing her legal options. Mishti later described Bulbul as “very knowledgeable” and “supportive.” Bulbul also introduced Mishti to the NGO where she was taking a training class, accompanying her personally to her first appointment. While Bulbul thought Mishti was “crazy,” she also knew that Mishti could help her expand her social networks and validate her expertise in the town where they lived. Mishti’s natal family was politically connected, with members in the TMC. The TMC, incidentally, was Bulbul’s husband’s political party. Some months after she had introduced Mishti to the NGO, Bulbul mentioned her husband had developed a closer working relationship with Mishti’s politically active uncle. Meanwhile, Mishti spread the word among her friends that Bulbul was someone who understood women’s rights. She also affirmed this image of Bulbul at the NGO, noting in her intake session that it was Bulbul who told her how to register a criminal and civil report. By accompanying Mishti to the police station where she eventually registered a report against her husband, Bulbul cemented a growing relationship she had with the constables in that precinct. The sub-inspector of that station later began referring women to Bulbul’s counseling services. Bulbul’s intervention on Mishti’s behalf highlighted how brokers helped women even when they found the woman in question to be an unsympathetic victim. Normative commitments to rights did not necessarily drive Bulbul’s interventions, because her normative commitments were complex and riddled with contradictions. Mishti fit the archetypal selfish and spoiled urban woman Bulbul despised and claimed she did not wish to help. But help her she did. By helping Mishti, Bulbul was able to expand her networks with rights activists and State personnel, further cement her name as a local women’s rights expert, and even enhance her husband’s political connections.

Reputation and Money Bulbul’s connections with the TMC indexed a broader pattern within my research. Political parties, politicians, and political party cadre repeatedly cropped up in the daily ins and outs of domestic violence cases. Some party members weighed in on cases intermittently, while others appeared

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to make rights work something of a routine business. Kamal, a wiry man in his late fifties with smallpox scars on his face and a loud voice, had been a party worker for the CPI(M) his entire adult life. Born into a poor family with a small plot of land, Kamal believed in the CPI(M)’s pro-labor rhetoric. He worked closely with a peasant union headquartered in North-24 Parganas, not far from the village where he lived. It was through the union’s women’s wing that I first met Kamal, who frequently visited the union headquarters to discuss labor disputes and serve as a witness on behalf of abused women. Kamal talked extremely fast, gesticulating with his hands, and had a habit of getting riled up over political issues. He was usually found to be seated at either the tea stall that was positioned at the entrance of his village or in front of the sweet shop a few paces down the dirt road. He incessantly smoked cigarettes but never in front of women. When he saw me coming, he would throw his cigarette on the ground and rub his hands on his pants as if to cleanse himself of contamination. The first time I talked to him one-on-one, he appeared visibly uncomfortable when I sat down next to him at the tea stall he frequented. He immediately introduced me to the other men milling about the stall, loudly proclaiming my credentials as a “scholarship” student at a “well-reputed American university.” He announced my full name, Poulami Roychowdhury, and mentioned that my uncle was a “well-known doctor.” He also ordered the boy who ran the tea stall to arrange a table so I could take notes, shooing away men who were standing too close and telling them I needed space to do my work. Kamal’s actions and words that morning were far from accidental. By loudly proclaiming my credentials and my social background, by physically distancing himself and other men from my periphery, and by discarding his cigarette, he sought to establish my respectability and dispel gossip about the nature of our meeting and its potential romantic possibilities. He highlighted my academic excellence by marking the prestige of my university and calling me a “scholarship” student (which, technically speaking, I was not). By announcing my full name, he let everyone know that I came from a Hindu family and that I was upper caste. And if that did not cement the deal, he called attention to my uncle’s status in a profession deemed at the apex of professional success in West Bengal. Only by being exceptionally talented and exceptionally elite could I hope to escape judgment as a young woman sitting in a space that no other woman occupied. Respectable women stayed indoors, avoided smoking and drinking,

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and did not talk to unknown men. Kamal believed in these distinctions and would have been quite shocked to know that I, myself, smoked on a regular basis. Kamal’s attention to women’s respectability provided a lens on his gendered ideologies and intuitions about domestic violence. Kamal did not believe men and women should be equal. He firmly believed they were different and unequal, and it was everyone’s job to peacefully uphold distinct roles and obligations. At home Kamal had a son and a daughter close to the same ages as Bulbul’s children. Unlike Bulbul, who strove to provide her children with equal opportunities, Kamal never entertained the idea that his daughter and son should follow the same path. His son, he asserted, needed to attend college and enter a well-paid profession. His daughter needed to get married and have children. Despite the frequency with which he intervened on women’s behalf, Kamal understood domestic abuse as aberrational acts of violence against “good” girls in unfortunate situations. He did not view violence as a systemic issue linked to gender inequality. Instead of upholding women’s rights, he spent a good deal of time lamenting what he termed the “destruction” of the extended family. He did not blame changing economic imperatives or violence against women for the supposed destruction. He focused his ire on women’s growing laziness and self-involvement. “In our grandmother’s generation, a girl would be married, and she thought of the new family as her own. They were devoted….These days, a new bride won’t even fetch her father-in-law a glass of water.” His words revealed key gendered biases. He intimated that women rightfully belonged in the home, tending to family members’ needs. An idealized generation of grandmothers had taken care of aging parents. They provided a foil to contemporary women who challenged the patriarchal extended family by refusing to serve their father-in-law. Kamal’s sexist attitudes and his insistence that women were to blame for family disintegration sat in uneasy tension with his ongoing interventions on women’s behalf. He routinely accompanied women to the peasant union’s headquarters, introducing them to caseworkers. He served as a witness for abused women in the union’s arbitrations, testifying to abusive situations and recommending various forms of compensation. When these arbitration sessions led to financial settlements or residential agreements, Kamal became the point person for community enforcement. He organized surveillance teams at the village level to ensure that abusive men paid alimony and that women who had secured housing were not harassed.

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And, like Bulbul, he provided these services even when he did not especially like the woman in question. A mildly ironic situation, where Kamal ended up advocating for two women who accused the other of domestic abuse, highlighted this contradiction. The women in question were a new bride and a mother-in-law, both of whom alleged that the other was routinely verbally and physically abusive. Kamal brought each of them to the peasant union separately, counseled them individually, and spoke on both of their behalf during the union-led arbitration. Behind the scenes, he narrowed his eyes and told me that both women were “extremely mischievous.” He confirmed that both of them hit each other and “deserved” to have the other as an in-law. How to reconcile Kamal’s ideas with his actions? Partly, despite his misogynistic attitudes, Kamal legitimately seemed to want to help people. He grew melancholy when hearing stories of injustice and irate when he felt people were being oppressed. His emotional predilections clearly motivated his work. But the interventions also personally benefited him, both symbolically and financially. By becoming a mediator between women, a peasant’s union, and the criminal justice system, Kamal hoped to build a reputation for himself that would propel him upward in the CPI(M) political machinery. He also routinely accepted money from women who could afford to pay him for his services. While the remuneration he received was not exorbitant, it helped finance small expenditures and stabilized his position within his own family. While discussing his political career as a CPI(M) party worker, Kamal expressed feeling slighted. Having joined the party in his teens and worked steadily on the party’s behalf over the past few decades, he believed he had not received the recognition he deserved. He campaigned for the party around elections, secured votes, organized election drives, bussed supporters to rallies, and set up election pandels (stages for electoral speeches and performances). His goal had always been to run for office, but he had never received the “backing” he needed. “They keep fielding other candidates,” he complained, mentioning that he was shunted aside by party bosses. This sense of bereavement fueled his desire to create a reputation for himself within the villages and communities the party served. “If the party won’t [recognize me], voters will,” Kamal mentioned. Advocating for women’s rights and establishing himself as the person citizens turned to on matters of domestic violence provided a pathway toward the political visibility and status he craved. Rights work had two reputational advantages. First, rights brokers could present themselves as good

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people who were invested in other people’s welfare. Rights brokers enjoyed a certain moral high ground above the “dirty” world of politics while simultaneously enjoying credibility as political actors (Ruud 2001). Second, rights brokers could provide ready proof of their capabilities through their work. They arranged appointments with the police, introduced women to NGOs, negotiated and enforced settlements, and rebuked and occasionally threatened abusive men. “Because I do this work, people know I can get things done,” Kamal mentioned. “That’s what they want to see at the panchayat.” Like other mediated services, such as electricity and water, by helping women access rights brokers demonstrated their ability to take care of civilians. Kamal believed that his demonstration of efficacy with women’s rights would someday translate into voters electing him to the village council. In addition to building a reputation for himself, Kamal also needed money. He received a salary from the CPI(M) for the campaigning he did on the party’s behalf. But the money was irregular and not enough to run a family. His wife, who worked as a schoolteacher, was the main breadwinner in the family—a fact that created friction within the home and made Kamal depressed. He felt bad that his wife had to commute for an hour in heavy traffic to the school where she taught. Kamal felt that he had failed in his duty to protect his wife from the hardship of working outside the home and as such had failed to live up to the gendered division of labor he ideologically prized. He also let slip how his financial position limited his ability to spend money as he would have chosen. “My wife doesn’t like me spending money on cigarettes,” he laughed uneasily. He intimated that he had to find money for unapproved expenditures on his own, which hinted at tensions at home. Given his financial situation, domestic violence interventions provided a steady income stream. Kamal made no secret about accepting monetary compensation from the women he helped. He claimed he never charged women who were poor, only accepting money from those with family support or after a financial settlement. Members of the peasant’s union confirmed that Kamal was relatively principled about these financial transactions. He reportedly helped women even if they could not pay (potentially because of the reputational benefits of providing pro bono services). Kamal used the money he earned to finance purchases his wife disapproved of, including the pack of cigarettes he consumed on a daily basis, as well as buying his many friends and acquaintances chai at his village tea shop. He also used the money to buy gifts for his children,

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expressing great joy at his ability to bring a smile to their faces despite his inability to provide the lifestyle or opportunities that wealthier children enjoyed.

Conclusion In West Bengal, diverse actors profess to help women experiencing violence. They do not necessarily intervene because they are committed to women’s rights. Some of them express complex and, at times, contradictory intuitions about gender inequality and the law, while others draw attention to women’s culpability and mental insanity. What unites them is their desire to seize various opportunities they find in the rights market: an opportunity to become socially significant, to make a bit of money, to become politically powerful, and to become better educated. By mediating between women and the State, people like Kamal and Bulbul acquired resources that they would have otherwise had a difficult time securing. Brokerage provided access to important social, cultural, symbolic, and economic capital—capital that was not readily available to people of their social background. By helping women in her village, Bulbul expanded her social networks by strengthening her connections to law enforcement personnel, activists, and other civil society groups. Limited by a high-school education because of her gender and social class, she also brokered rights because it provided access to cultural capital: expertise on the arcane and difficult to understand language of the law. For Kamal, a small-time political operative and long-time party worker for the CPI(M), brokerage provided much needed symbolic capital: the good reputation he needed to maintain visibility within a party machinery that overlooked his skills and qualifications. Struggling financially and heavily reliant on his wife’s earnings, Kamal also viewed brokerage as an avenue toward economic capital. Brokerage was a gendered strategy aimed at reclaiming some semblance of the masculinized breadwinner role he craved. It provided the extra money he needed to alleviate his sense of shame and dampen conflict over the expenditures he made. Brokers did not simply access one form of capital while eschewing others. While I have presented Bulbul and Kamal’s stories in such a way as to highlight specific forms of capital, the reader may have already gleaned the possible connections between social, cultural, symbolic, and economic capital in their lives. For example, in the process of acquiring symbolic

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capital (a reputation within the CPIM), Kamal also amassed social capital (networks with political parties, law enforcement, and civilians). Both the economic and symbolic dimensions of his work also helped him secure a level of cultural capital in his village as well as within his own family, attenuating the insecurity he felt as a man who had dropped out of college and who was not the primary breadwinner. Meanwhile, cultural capital (knowledge of the law) and social capital (networks with women’s rights activists) allowed Bulbul to eventually access economic capital (a job as a caseworker at a women’s NGO). It was because she was already known in the area as someone who intervened on women’s behalf that NGO members chose to promote Bulbul within the organization. She was one of the few graduates of the course to receive a paid position within the NGO. Bulbul’s and Kamal’s stories also highlight how brokerage provided one of the few avenues for mobility for people of their social position. They lived in a place where resources were scarce and extremely unevenly distributed by class, gender, caste, and religion. Neither of them was particularly privileged. When interpreted within this social context, Bulbul and Kamal’s motivations for doing the work they did become legible not only as attempts at enrichment but also as attempts at empowerment. While Bulbul and Kamal may not have described their efforts using these specific terms, they both explained that brokerage helped rectify the personal, classed, and gendered injustices they had suffered. For Bulbul, growing up a girl in a family where she was devalued, relative to boys, the work she did helped correct for an upbringing where she had been denied not just food but also key educational opportunities because of her gender. Similarly, for Kamal, growing up poor in a village where he was repeatedly overlooked by relatively elite political party members for top posts, brokerage created the masculine authority and reputation he needed to overcome the hurdles that poor, rural men faced within the party hierarchy. These findings, while specific to domestic violence and the context of West Bengal, nonetheless provide a framework for thinking through the possibility for rights in other places. More generally, they outline the conditions under which rights are likely to operate as a business: a site where people intervene in hopes of acquiring economic, social, cultural, and symbolic resources irrespective of their ideological commitments. First, this article implies that a market for brokerage services may crop up whenever a particular kind of right that is needed by ordinary people is on the books but where enforcement is poor, either because state capacity is low or law enforcement personnel lack the will to implement legal

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reforms. Brokers have been shown to facilitate access to a range of legal rights, from property rights in China to immigrant workers rights in the United States (Hsing 2006; Gleeson 2014). Brokerage opportunities arise in these spaces because citizens cannot access state-based rights and services on their own. This condition, to put it in simple economics terms, creates a demand for brokers. And, seizing this opportunity, diverse actors get involved in rights work. Second, these actors become brokers not necessarily because they are ideologically committed to rights, but because they, themselves, lack economic, social, symbolic, and cultural resources. Deprived of meaningful opportunities for social mobility and personal growth, they may seek out brokerage as an occupation because it requires the mediational functions that people of their social background are well poised to provide. To return to Economics 101, this condition creates a supply of brokers, encouraging people who might otherwise be disinterested or hostile to women’s rights to get involved in the field. While existing literature on brokerage and poor people’s relationship to the State, both in India and in a number of other developing countries, focuses on the effects that brokerage has on clients, this article suggests that there are significant and meaningful effects for brokers. Brokerage, in other words, does not simply alleviate issues related to marginalization and poverty for the poor. It may house a very similar function for those who serve as brokers, providing otherwise inaccessible avenues to social, cultural, symbolic, and financial resources. My sample of brokers, which included a number of women, men from working- and lower-class backgrounds, as well as people who came from relatively disadvantaged caste backgrounds and rural areas, indicates that the possibility for capital accumulation that brokerage provides may be a special opportunity for historically deprived populations. Neither Kamal nor Bulbul were at the top of the social ladder within West Bengal; they struggled to eke out a living somewhere in the middle. Marginalized because of their gender, class, educational backgrounds, religion, and residential location, they became brokers because they could not easily become anything else and because brokerage promised to alleviate the social hurdles they faced. Finally, readers may wish to understand the normative implications of rights brokerage. Do brokers help women who claim rights? While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to fully develop an answer to this question, it merits some attention. I believe the answer is decidedly mixed. On

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the positive side, the fact that so many people profess to help women experiencing violence may indicate that, at some level, women’s rights have become what social movement scholars call a “master frame” (Benford and Snow 2000). Despite normative conflict, rights increasingly organize social action and influence how people conceptualize the possibilities for women’s lives and what they can claim from their communities and state. This possibility is a net gain. Along these lines, brokerage may do more than signify positive discursive changes—it may facilitate women’s access to concrete resources and protections they otherwise would not have been able to secure. Institutionalized forms of resource brokerage available in the United States, for instance, have been shown to mitigate the effects of urban poverty (Small 2006). On the negative side of things, the very fact that so many different kinds of people with different ideologies and methods interface between women and the State may mean that the content and meaning of rights is being diluted. Does a political party operative who dislikes “lazy” and “self-centered” women systematically have the same effects on women’s welfare, compared to an ideologically committed caseworker? This is an empirical question that can only be answered through comparative research on brokers’ effects, but my intuition tells me the answer is no.

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CHAPTER 3

Degrees of Freedom: Strategic (Non)engagement in Land Markets Beth Prosnitz

“Women’s empowerment” is an overburdened descriptor for women’s economic, social, and political mobility and freedoms, particularly when used in reference to women in the Global South. In Nepal, where “women’s empowerment” is often central to the politics of neoliberal state formation and international development, it becomes particularly important I am indebted to countless Saptari residents, without whom this research would have been impossible. I am beyond grateful for the generosity of women in Saptari, Nepal, who invited me into their lives and shared their stories with me. Thank you to the Fulbright Commission in Nepal, and specifically Dr. Tom Robertson, Yamal Rajbhandary, and other grantees for their friendship, support, and patience. Dheari, dherai dhanyabad to Bharti Yadav for her translation support. I owe many, many thanks to Dr. Sharmila Rudrappa, my committee members, fellow students in the Sociology Department at UT Austin, and the editors of this volume, Drs. Smitha Radhakrishnan and Gowri Vijayakumar, for helping me transform field-notes and scrambled thoughts into a chapter.

B. Prosnitz (*) The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Radhakrishnan, G. Vijayakumar (eds.), Sociology of South Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97030-7_3

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to examine and demystify how women negotiate their economic, social, and political mobility and freedoms (Leve 2007; Rankin 2001; Tamang 2000, 2002, 2009). Scholars have deemed land ownership important for women’s mobility and freedoms, providing women with economic security (e.g., Agarwal 1994). In Nepal, land rights have been a central component of women’s rights movements as well as “women’s empowerment” policies, practices, and political discourses. Women’s rights to anshabanda, or ancestral property from their natal homes, was often seen as a defining feature of the women’s rights movements in the 1990s, despite its largely upper caste and class orientations (Tamang 2000, 2009). Since the anshabanda movement in the 1990s, policymakers and development practitioners, in the name of “women’s empowerment,” have lobbied for women’s access to all forms of land and have even incentivized the issuance of titles to all forms of land through tax discounts. Despite the intensive legal activism in the 1990s, few women claim anshabanda from their natal homes. Instead, in Saptari District, a southern district of critical economic and political importance in Nepal, many women acquire land through other means, particularly through the market. What, then, do these patterns in women’s land acquisition reveal about women’s economic, social, and political mobility and freedoms in a postwar, (neo)liberal Nepal where individuated rights to land and property remain a development priority? To answer this question, I look at women’s reasons for rejecting claims to anshabanda lands and their reasons for claiming other types of lands, particularly those made available in the market. I trace how women across castes and classes seek to attain degrees of freedom through strategic (non) engagements in land. This means that women claim certain lands and reject others as means to protect against precarity. Women’s strategic (non)engagements are deeply shaped by their aspirations for lives made less precarious by family patriarchy and (neo)liberalization. Classical Polanyian thought suggests that land, labor, and money, in order to be marketized, are stripped of their social meanings. Feminist engagements with Polanyi challenge these notions and show that the logics of marketization can be mobilized to reject modes of domination and reconstitute social meanings (Fraser 2013). However, these engagements focus on women’s participation in the labor market and work-for-wages, rather than land ownership and participation in the land market. Moreover, that land defies Western normative conceptions of feudal or capitalist economics is critical. Land in Nepal operates in many ways, and it means many things to women across castes (Pradhan et al. 2019). It lies between

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embeddedness and marketization, and its social properties are situated within love (Kunreuther 2009, 2014) and pain (Rai 2015). Prices and monetary valuations guide women’s (non)engagements with land without stripping land, entirely, of social meanings, particularly those of love and care for the family. Social meanings are malleable and mutable, with migration, urbanization, marital status, age, caste, and other factors having their impacts on how women approach land ownership and (non)engagement in land. In particular, the marketization of land reconstitutes the social meanings of land by reconfiguring women’s needs and the organization of patriarchy. Women are acutely aware of marketization and how to live under its dictates. In fact, the acute pressures for money shape women’s variegated interests in various types of land, whether it is anshabanda or other forms of land. Women do not have singular interests in land, but they are motivated to either claim or reject lands based on the matrices of interest emerging from their roles as daughters, wives, and mothers. Women navigate the unstable and sometimes hostile terrains of patriarchy—particularly legal and economic dependence on men family members—and the financial precarities induced by liberalization, marketization, and development. This means that women think about how to best protect themselves against the ravages of the markets and various forms of patriarchy by rejecting claims to lands that they experience as “embedded” in the family and by claiming other lands that they experience as “dis-embedded” by marketization. Instead of being unilaterally “empowered” through ancestral land ownership, women strategically make decisions to engage or not engage in land markets to carve out attainable degrees of freedom under neoliberalism and development regimes.

Methods This chapter is based on ethnographic research that I conducted from August 2018 to June 2019 in Saptari District, Nepal. Saptari, a core Terai district, sits on the border between Nepal and the Indian state of Bihar. Saptari is home to an estimated 640,000 people, most of whom are Maithili speakers from non-dominant castes who work in agriculture. Because Saptari is low-level flatlands, well suited to rice and wheat production, the Government of Nepal has viewed Saptari as the bedrock of agricultural production and productivity. However, in recent years, agricultural productivity has declined across Nepal, which has prompted new waves of

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international labor migration (Adhikari and Hobley 2012). Many men, and some women, migrate to the Gulf, Malaysia, and India to work and remit money to family in Nepal. The postwar period in Saptari has been marked by marketization and, subsequently, dramatic changes in land, labor, and money, including increases in men’s labor migration and women’s land ownership rates. Despite its importance to Nepal’s economy, few studies have focused on Saptari District. My data collection included observations in regional government offices dealing with land registration and taxation, regional courts that handled land disputes, and 33 interviews with women landholders. The government offices included the following: Land Revenue Offices in the cities of Rajbiraj and Kanchanpur, the Land Reform Office in Rajbiraj, and the District Court in Rajbiraj. The Land Revenue Office’s primary role is to issue land titles and collect land taxes. The Land Reform Office negotiates redistribution of land from landowners to tenant-farmers. The District Court is the court of first instance, where land-related conflicts are arbitrated by a federally appointed judge. Anshabanda comprises a large portion of cases filed at the Courts. However, it proved difficult to determine the number or proportion of cases filed by women. Court case data are not disaggregated by gender, and women’s anshabanda claims are often embedded in divorce, rape, and other cases. However, court staff, lawyers, judges, and women litigants, themselves, mentioned that almost no women file anshabanda claims at the Court against their natal homes; rather, consistent with Agarwal (1994), these cases are filed against their marital homes, often as a means to seek financial restitution for abuse. At these sites I spent time with and observed two primary groups of people as they worked: court-licensed paralegals, who are private contractors who conduct business outside the government office buildings, and government staff, who work inside the government office buildings where land documents are checked, approved, recorded, issued, and disputed. Staff in Land Revenue Offices, Land Reform Offices, and the Courts are civil servants who have been appointed by the federal Public Service Commission. I combined my ethnographic observations with interviews with women engaged in land transactions. I interviewed 33 women across classes, castes, and geographical locations, including both urban and rural locations. I sampled women engaged in two processes: 22 individuals involved in land registration, and 11 involved in case filing. Land registration, which happens at the Land Revenue Office, typically involves the

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establishment and documentation of legal ownership to land, mutually agreed to by at least two parties. Case filing, which happens at the Courts and the Land Reform Office, typically involves claims, counterclaims, disputes, and/or mutually agreed to redistribution of land. I use “local” (read: Nepali) taxonomies and typologies to describe land ownership in Saptari. Throughout this chapter, I use the Nepali names for these processes so that I may accurately represent them. It is also important to note that, although Nepali is the language of record, the lingua franca of Saptari is Maithili. Many women I met knew both Nepali and Maithili, while others knew only Maithili; thus, I enlisted the support of a translator, Bharti Yadav, to assist with communications in Maithili. Bharti helped me immensely in navigating fieldwork. Land is a sensitive topic of conversation. In having Bharti—a woman who was local, and who spoke many languages—by my side, women often felt more comfortable meeting with me. My identity as a white, American woman was always on display, and it became a feature of my interactions with interviewees. It required constant engagement and negotiation, and it often provoked curiosity, amusement, and anxiety. To calm anxieties and make women comfortable, we would always meet where women wanted to meet and on their terms. Bharti and I would occasionally travel hours to meet them near or at their homes. Usually, it took time before the interview began to re-explain myself and my project and to reassure women that their identities would remain private. When Maithili was a barrier, Bharti did additional work to calm nerves. Despite these initial anxieties, women were open. American notions of privacy and confidentiality do not map easily onto Nepali contexts. Consent forms, which were entirely unfamiliar to many women whom I interviewed, often provoked more anxiety than reassurance, and in order to make them familiar or less threatening, we would read them aloud and explain each point. At times, in order to make women feel comfortable, I had to slacken my notions of privacy and accept that the women I interviewed preferred for our conversations to be overheard by children or other family members. At one point, I had planned to visit an area where I was uncertain about my security. I talked with several journalists and friends, all of whom acknowledged my hesitation and encouraged me to go. One friend told me the area I planned to visit was a Yadav-caste area and, since Bharti is Yadav, that I would have no need to worry. Bharti’s caste would often be pointed out by interviewees when Bharti was not around. The various

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ways in which caste, race, gender, and class combined and permeated our interviews require deeper reflection and analysis.

“Triple Movements” and Degrees of Freedom Through Strategic (Non)engagement in Land Marketization in land, labor, and money has meant that women increasingly find themselves in need of cash. In classical Polanyian thought, marketization strips land of its social conventions or meanings by replacing these meanings with market-driven prices. Polanyi warns of the destructive capacities of marketization on societies. Authorizing the market to govern social life, Polanyi argues, “would result in the demolition of society” (1944 [2000], 76) and ultimately leads to a “double movement.” The “double movement,” involves, first, rapacious and expansionist marketization and, second, a social protectionism that intends to either repair or stave off the destruction of that marketization. Polanyi views the “double movement” as imminent in times of crisis. However, as feminist scholars note, the “double movement” is not a foregone conclusion. Political theorist Nancy Fraser (2013) reframes the “double movement” as the “triple movement.” The “triple movement” bears similarities to the “double movement” in that marketization governs political action; however, it attends to modes of domination (Fraser 2013), particularly patriarchy and colonialism, each of which violently extract labor from gendered and racialized populations. Movements for emancipation from patriarchal, racist, homophobic, and other modes of domination may engage the logics of marketization to do so. The “triple movement” reflects an understanding of how these movements engage the logics of marketization to reject a social protectionism that reconstitutes these patriarchal, racist, and homophobic modes of domination. This may be seen in women’s right-to-work movements and other movements to sell free labor, such as abolition movements, which situate money as a stepping-stone to freedom. Far from idealizing marketization and liberal capitalism as freedom, actors in this “triple movement” seek to establish autonomy and freedom from patriarchal and colonialist domination under the constraints of (neo)liberal capitalism. How does this “triple movement” help us better understand women’s participation in land markets in Nepal?

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Feminist social scientists have extensively studied how women’s participation in markets in South Asia transforms their lives under patriarchy and neoliberal capitalism. For example, Sharmila Rudrappa (2016) in her study of surrogacy in India, dispels the notion that surrogacy is merely an exploitative trap for oppressed women. Rudrappa discusses surrogate mothers as “wheelers and dealers, hustlers in a neoliberal global economy, attempting to get a secure foothold in the face of increased precarity” (2016, 161). Women who participate in land markets can, likewise, be seen as “wheelers and dealers” who use land to guard against precarity. Economist Bina Agarwal (1994, 2003) notes that the extension of land rights to women in South Asia is critical for this reason. The women Agarwal interviewed approached land as something that could provide them with a “fall-back” position should the labor market or their benefactors (typically husbands) be unable to do so (1994, 54–81). Thus, contra Polanyi, the marketization of land has not meant that land has been stripped of its social conventions or meanings; instead, the marketization of land confers new meanings on land by reconstituting women’s needs. As Agarwal (1994) and Fraser (2013) would expect, women across castes and classes in Saptari engage with the market to protect against precarity. However, given the many types of land in Saptari, the many entry points into land ownership, and the many meanings and desires attached to these various types of land, women make strategic decisions to engage or not engage land markets in order to leverage land to protect themselves, establish a “good life,” and attain degrees of freedom. Scholars of Nepal have already pointed out the limits of empowerment frameworks in discussions of caste and land (e.g., Giri 2018; Rai 2015, 2018; Guneratne 1996). As this literature indicates, land ownership is not a panacea for inequality or disempowerment (Giri 2018; Guneratne 1996; Rai 2015). Caste and caste-based inequalities emerge, and are maintained, via land. Non-dominant castes, such as Dalits, and many Janajati-Adivasi communities were dispossessed of land and coerced into unfree labor. Normative assumptions that non-dominant castes and Janajati-Adivasi communities in this position would prioritize land rights as a form of empowerment have been challenged (e.g., Giri 2018; Rai 2015, 2018; Guneratne 1996). Land ownership and control of land, for some landless Janajati-Adivasi communities, is undesirable because of how the state used land as a mode of extraction and control (Guneratne 1996; Rai 2015). As anthropologist Janak Rai argues, for Dhimals, a Janajati-Adivasi community in Morang District, an Eastern Terai district near to Saptari, land is

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non-commodifiable, “inalienable” wealth (Rai 2018), and that for Dhimals, land ownership is a source of dukkha, or pain (Rai 2015). Land ownership, for Dhimals, was associated with poverty because of the monetary costs and potential for unbridled debt associated with land capitalization and the potential for an oppressive state to extract and exploit Dhimal communities. Dukkha, Rai argues, in the context of land is less about the corporeal dimensions of pain than it is about Terai-specific histories of land dispossession. But what happens once women get title to land? And how do those experiences differ across various castes, classes, and ethnicities? Feminist scholars of Nepali women’s movements and political participation note that public discourse frequently flattens women’s social subjectivities (Leve 2007), eliding differences among them in ways that create and sustain an essentialist archetype of an undifferentiated, one-dimensional Nepali woman in need of development (Tamang 2002, 2009). Although literature on the anshabanda movement has revealed the importance of women’s differentiated positionalities and subjectivities (Kunreuther 2009, 2014) within the movement, we know little about what has happened in the years since then. My findings reveal that few women claim anshabanda from their natal home, yet many women obtain land either through the land market or through anshabanda suits against their marital homes. Given these trends, what is to be made of the “triple movement,” and “women’s empowerment” via land rights? As I demonstrate, marketization can reconstitute the meanings and values of land for women. Women navigate the terrains of patriarchy and precarity and, in the case of land, often participate in the land market to attain some bargaining power and security (Agarwal 1994, 2003). Women, as both Agarwal (1994) and Fraser (2013) note, neither valorize nor validate the ostensibly oppressive systems in which they knowingly participate. By thinking through the varied reasons women claim or relinquish title to land, and the extent to which women attain degrees of freedom through (non)engagements with the land market, a more complicated picture of mobility and freedom emerges. Thus, rather than think through a “triple movement,” I think through how degrees of freedom through strategic (non)engagements in land correspond with the variegated socio-cultural meanings of land and women’s needs, which are often informed by the price values of the market.

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Context Land ownership in Nepal—and in particular, the Terai—is complex and unsettled, and has, historically, been connected to state formation, economic stratification, and caste and gender-based social inequalities (e.g., Basnet 2018; Burghart 1984; Cameron 1995; Dahal 2018; Giri 2018; Regmi 1972, 1977 [2014], 1978, 2002; Rai 2015, 2018; Seddon 2018). Scholars of land and the state in Nepal describe the social and economic relations of land in various ways, including Nepal as a “landlord state” (Regmi 1972; Rai 2015, 2018), as semi-colonized by Europe (Karki 2002), internally colonized (Rai 2015, 2018; Jha 2017), and “semi-­feudal” with capitalist tendencies (Sugden 2017). As these scholars note, land typologies are important for conceptualizing the relationships between the Nepali state and its citizens, as well as economic life (e.g., Regmi 1972, 1977 [2014], 1978, 2002; Rai 2015, 2018; Sugden 2017). In recent years, many studies have focused on how colonialism, postcolonialism, and postcolonial development shape land policies and practices (e.g., Levien 2012; Li 2007, 2014; Lund 2016). However, Nepal, and particularly the Terai makes for an interesting case in the study of land, labor, and capital in the postcolonial, neoliberal world. Unlike other South Asian countries, Nepal was technically not colonized by European countries. Land tenure regimes, contemporary laws on land ownership, and land use patterns, thus, must be viewed within the specific contexts of Nepal’s status as a noncolonized country in a postcolonial, globalized world. Women’s advocacy for land and property rights—particularly anshabanda—in Nepal have been documented back to the 1950s; however, it was in the 1990s when this advocacy gained traction and widespread attention. That the anshabanda movement gained traction in this period is no accident; the 1990s was a period of social, political, and economic change in Nepal. In 1990 the Government of Nepal transitioned to a constitutional monarchy, and then, in 1996, the civil war between the Maoists and state security forces began. In the early 1990s, lawyers used this new constitution to sue the federal government on behalf of women for anshabanda and other rights to land. The Maoists, who advocated for equal anshabanda rights, also advocated for the elimination of debt-bondage and slavery, particularly in the Terai. Thus, both the anshabanda and the Maoist movements demanded the redistribution of land rights in Nepal in the 1990s. Paralleling these developments, the 1990s was also a period of liberalization and marketization, including in land, in Nepal (Nelson 2017)

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These changes to political structures were met with changes in economic production. Agricultural productivity in Saptari, like elsewhere in Nepal, is on a steady decline. However, in Saptari, unlike other border districts, there is little industry or commerce outside of agriculture. Employment and income are often unsecured and precarious. This is compounded by the fact that very few women view agriculture as work. When I interviewed women who farmed, nearly all of them told me they did not work. Even though many women I interviewed work in agriculture for their own sustenance and family income, money felt in short supply, and work was viewed as being done outside of the home. Women expressed to me that money was necessary to pay for services that are, ostensibly, public, such as education for young children or healthcare. Nearly everyone I met at land-related government agencies, as well as those I met in the course of my daily lived-life, spoke to me about how little money they earn and believed they could not afford to live in Nepal without the support of income from abroad. Even though there is a decades-long precedent for international labor migration from the Terai to other countries (Regmi 1978), the context in which international labor migration takes place now has shifted because of postwar development and marketization of labor and money. In postwar Nepal, nearly one-third of the GDP is remittances (e.g., Sijapati et al. 2017). Saptari is a migrant sending district, with primarily men migrating to India, Malaysia, and the Gulf to work and remit money to family in Saptari. While it is difficult to estimate the rates of outmigration from Saptari, nearly all women I interviewed had at least one male relative abroad. Many women reported to me that land purchases were financed, at least in part, by remittances. These changes in political structures and labor have deeply shaped land and land markets in Saptari.

The Many Prices of Ancestral Land In the 1990s, the political discourse on anshabanda was about love and legally recognizable membership in the natal family. The two poles of the anshabanda movement—those in support of and those in opposition to women’s anshabanda rights—contested the meanings of filial love, the social construction of family, freedom, and place (Kunreuther 2009, 2014; Tamang 2000). Anshabanda, and the feminist political discourse on it, reveal the extent to which anshabanda land is embedded in both patriarchal and caste-based legal conceptions of the Hindu family (Gilbert 1992). Women, once married, lost claims to membership in their natal home,

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thus, prior to the 1990s, the General Legal Code barred women from claiming anshabanda. In 1990, the democracy movement ushered in a new constitution, one which included an equal protection clause, and a new wave of development interventions, including Nepal’s ratification of the UN Convention to Eliminate Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). This new political terrain opened legal spaces to women who sought to end discriminatory anshabanda practices, and these women prevailed. When I arrived in Saptari District, I expected to meet women landowners who claimed anshabanda from their natal homes; however, I was surprised to meet almost no women who did so. In the 10 months that I lived in Saptari, I was able to interview only two women who claimed anshabanda from their natal homes, and in both cases, it was their mother’s land. One was a woman I met through the District Court who had counter-­sued her sister for a share of her mother’s land. The other was a woman I met at the Land Revenue Office who was interested in whether she could claim anshabanda. This woman had placed land in her mother’s name, and now, to avoid a conflict with her brother-in-law, she wanted to claim anshabanda and put her land back in her own name. Consistent with what Agarwal (1994) observed, women in Saptari almost never filed for ancestral property rights from their natal side but would do so from their husband’s family in cases of divorce or as restitution for domestic violence or abandonment. Women in this position told me anshabanda claims could financially protect them and their children from further harm. For these women, the potential to sell the land for cash was one important part of their decision to do so. Those who sought anshabanda from their husbands had no intention to divorce their husbands for fear of social isolation or further violence. Consistent with Agarwal (1994) and Fraser (2013), women engaged market logics—acquiring their husbands’ anshabanda lands because of its potential cash values—to shore up a fall-back position, one which allowed them financial restitution, as well as physical and social protection. Across caste and class positions, women who seek title to land in Saptari are typically engaged in the purchase, sale, or mortgage of land. On average, approximately 1800 women conduct land registration in their names each month at the Land Revenue Office in Saptari’s capital city, Rajbiraj, where most land in Saptari is registered. The Rajbiraj Land Revenue Office records significantly higher numbers and rates of women’s land registration in purchases, sales, and mortgages than in anshabanda. Monthly, on

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average, 1663 women, or approximately 92 percent of the 1800 women registrants, title land as a purchase, sale, or mortgage, whereas only 19 women, or approximately one percent title land as anshabanda. I interviewed dozens of women landowners who were unwilling to claim anshabanda from their parents. As Agarwal (1994, 421–466) notes, maintenance of brotherly love by sacrificing rights to ancestral property is one way by which women use land to bargain for their future welfare. Many women who are unwilling to claim anshabanda from their natal homes, and who have enough income or access to money, purchase their own land. Women viewed anshabanda from their natal homes just as they viewed their purchased lands: as means to attain a degree of freedom and protection against precarity. Anshabanda, importantly, is both a financial and emotional “fall-back,” one which protects physically, emotionally, and financially against marital patriarchy. However, anshabanda can exist as “fall-back” only when women do not claim it from their natal homes. Anshabanda claims are dependent both on marketization—and in particular, the ability to sell land for cash—and filial love. Women who do not claim anshabanda lands are acutely aware of the monetary values of those lands, however, they chose to not claim those lands to protect both their monetary value and family love. Pramila, a recently widowed 50-year-old Tharu woman,1 who lives on the outskirts of Kanchanpur, one of Saptari’s two largest cities, told me that her land is important to the exercise of her rights and to her own economic security. For Pramila, land and the money associated with land are directly connected to her freedoms and mobility. I met Pramila through the Land Reform Office, where she claimed mohiyani hak, or tenant-­ farmers’ ownership rights to lands they have tilled.2 Under Land Reform acts, ones that were first initiated in the 1950s, tenant-farmers are able to 1  Tharu is a Janajati-Adivasi group from the plains. Experiences of Tharus in the Eastern Terai, where Saptari is, differs greatly from those in the Central, Western, and Far-Western Terai. In the East, many Tharus are large-scale landowners, while others are peasant-farmers. In the Central and Western Terai, many Tharus were forced into the Kamaiya system, which is a system of land dispossession and bonded labor. In the Far-Western Terai, many Tharus were forced into Kamaiya, while others found themselves with land and political power. 2  In Nepali, hak and adhikar are used to describe rights, however there are slight distinctions in how they are used. Hak tends to connote an inalienable right, one which oftentimes involves great labor to claim. Adhikar tends to connote a legal right, one which is bestowed by legal and/or political authorities. I frequently heard about hak ko adhikar, or the right to rights.

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claim ownership of up to half of landowners’ lands they have tilled. Pramila’s husband was entitled to mohiyani hak, and she learned she would be able to claim her deceased husband’s land after she had read a notice in the Gorkhapatra newspaper about it. I asked her about how she felt after she filed to claim her husband’s mohiyani hak. “I was very happy,” she said. “It’s for my own earnings, my own rights (aafno adhikar), I can’t just abandon those matters. And it’s that I no longer have a husband.” Mohiyani hak—and the land to which Pramila’s husband was entitled— carried many meanings for Pramila. Acutely aware of the precarity associated with widowhood, Pramila claimed her husband’s mohiyani hak to protect herself financially and socially, and to attain a degree of freedom from the ravages of the market. Pramila described herself as a woman deeply invested and active in women’s rights movements. Now retired, she had previously worked as a public school teacher. She worked even during the war, when working as a public school teacher was a risky profession. Although Pramila would neither confirm nor deny her participation in Maoist politics, she mentioned she had lost one-month’s pay because government employees were not allowed to be engaged in “those kinds of politics.” Nowadays, since she has been widowed, she said, “I have to do both women’s and men’s work.” I asked what she meant, and she said that she rides a motorcycle— not a scooter—and goes by herself to visit the Cadastral Survey Division office and other land-related offices. Pramila, like most Saptari residents who exchange or transact land, hired a paralegal to help fill and file paperwork at the Land Reform Office; however, unlike everyone else I interviewed, she fired him after he asked her for 20,000  rupees to file her paperwork. I asked her about her experiences engaging with staff without the help of a paralegal. “If he [the head of office] doesn’t listen, should I give him a flower garland? (mala)” she asked, rhetorically. “Look, sister,” she continued, “I’ve struggled a lot for women, a lot.” Pramila, as she suggests, balks at sexism and is adept at navigating the terrains of patriarchy. As she mentions here, she prioritizes her financial and social independence, and she sees herself as a women’s rights activist. I wondered, given her identity as a women’s rights activist, if she had claimed anshabanda from her natal home. I was surprised when she said no. Below is a segment of our conversation: Pramila: No. I have not taken [anshabanda]. Even now I have not taken. If you go to [my natal home district], let’s go, I’ll take

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you, but in case you go, my grandfather has so much farmland. I haven’t taken a single plot. Beth: Oh, Why? R: Come on, taking doesn’t happen! Because brothers… B: …But it’s your right (hak). R: Yes, it’s my right. Rights here in Nepal, they’ve given women the inalienable right to rights (hak ko adhikar). They have given rights. They’ve given anshabanda rights to land, but the thing with anshabanda in land is that the situation is that you have to be unmarried at 35 and you have to do anshabanda with your brother. And if you do anshabanda with your brother, then you don’t have a brother, and what’s bigger, your brother or your land? Maybe you don’t know this about our culture, but in Nepal, we say that Tharu’s natal home (maita) is heaven. So, because of that, why should I take ansha? Pramila, unaware that the age restrictions were no longer in place, articulated that anshabanda is a particular type of land that is socially distinct from other types of land. For Pramila—whose natal home is comprised of large landholders—to refuse legal claims to anshabanda is to maintain her natal home as a protected and safe place, as a “heaven,” that is filled with love and social connection. Given that Pramila, as she said earlier, claimed her husband’s mohiyani hak land for her financial independence and for the realization of her rights, her refusal to claim anshabanda from her natal home appears, on the surface, paradoxical. However, what this indicates is that anshabanda from the natal home offers a particular type of protection against patriarchy, but only when it is not claimed. Land, for Pramila, offers a fall-back position and is intimately connected with her ability to care for herself, financially and emotionally. For anshabanda rights activists, daughters’ rights to anshabanda were about membership in the natal family, as well as negotiating economic mobility and legal equality for women (Kunreuther 2009, 2014; Tamang 2000). However, for many married and widowed women with brothers, that mobility requires a twopronged strategy of relinquishing anshabanda rights and finding other lands through the market in order to maintain social ties with both natal and marital families. For many women like Pramila, the potential cost value of land and ability to marketize that land factors into decisions about whether, when, and how to claim legal title to land. I spent an afternoon with one woman landowner, whom I will call Savitri. Savitri is a middle-class Madhesi

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Brahmin woman with a Master’s degree in her 30s, who, combined with her husband earns about 20,000–30,000  rupees per month (approximately 200–300 USD).3 They have no savings. They have one daughter. Like many other families, Savitri and her one sister live in Saptari, and her three brothers live in other districts where they have been able to find higher-paying jobs than they would have found in Saptari. Savitri told me that even though women have equal anshabanda rights to those of their brothers, women will not claim those rights because they need love, help, care from their brothers, particularly if their marriages falter. Like Pramila, she said that she and her sister will not make anshabanda claims because they would not want to compromise that love. Much like Pramila, Savitri views her natal home anshabanda as both a financial and emotional fallback. By not claiming anshabanda from their natal homes, Pramila and Savitri maintain their natal home as protected space. For Savitri, like many other married women, this provides both protection and freedom from marital patriarchy. On the surface, it might appear that women seek to protect anshabanda from marketization by refusing to claim their shares; however, this is not entirely the case. Women, such as Savitri and Pramila, refused anshabanda precisely because of the ways by which family patriarchy and market patriarchy intersect to create gendered forms of precarity. As Savitri and Pramila each suggested, their anshabanda lands had a price value. However, that price value mattered only in the context of social value: Anshabanda land should not be claimed from their natal home so as to protect the natal home as a place of love and care. The value of that land matters to women and relinquishing claims to it serve a dual purpose: first, to avoid conflict with brothers whom they love and second, as Agarwal (1994) notes, to protect their futures in the event of patriarchal violence in their married homes or a loss of earned income. Women, such as Savitri and Pramila, are acutely aware of how land marketization affects precarity. Thus, in order to protect against precarity that arise from both marketization of labor and from marital family patriarchy, women do not claim anshabanda. Anshabanda is intimately tied to conceptions and feelings of love within natal families (Kunreuther 2009, 2014; Tamang 2000), particularly the love between sisters and brothers, and the monetary values associated 3  Exchange rates vary, and the “rule of thumb” is that 1  USD is approximately Rs. 100 NPR. At the time of the interview, the exchange rate was 1:111; however, at the time of writing it was 1:119.

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with marketization. As the next sections demonstrate, the ability to love and care is directly related to the ability to finance a good life.

Landing the “Good Life” It is notable that Savitri and Pramila, like nearly all 33 women I interviewed, wanted to own land so they could earn money through crop cultivation, rent, or liquidation of the land for cash. Land matters to women because money matters to women. And, for nearly all women I interviewed, money matters so that they can provide a good life for themselves and their children. Like many women I interviewed, Savitri owns two plots of land: one plot on the East-West Highway in Saptari and one plot in Biratnagar, Nepal’s second largest city and an economic hub, only two hours away by road from Rajbiraj. Savitri, however, does not live on the land she owns. The home and the land where she lives is owned by her mother-in-law, with whom she, her daughter, and her husband live. Savitri wishes she lived elsewhere. She, like many women I met, wanted to move from her married home, into a home with only her husband and child in a city where she believed her daughter would have a better education and where she would have better-paying work opportunities. Savitri confided in me that she was “unsatisfied” with her marriage and occasionally wished for an unmarried life because of the pressures of domestic labor put in place by both her husband and mother-in-law. Despite being “unsatisfied,” she considered her marriage a good marriage and had no plans to ever leave her husband. Savitri, like other women I met, purchased land on the East-West Highway, about a 30 minutes’ drive from her home, where the prices of land are expensive and increasing in value. She bought the land at the encouragement of her husband, with the hopes that the land value would increase so that she could sell it to fund her daughter’s education and wedding. Her daughter was eight years old at the time of our meeting. Savitri estimated that the wedding, including dowry, would cost 20 lakh, or 2,000,000 rupees (approximately 20,000 USD). The cost of the wedding would be impossible on their salaries, or with the contributions of their families, and so she purchased the land as an investment. She did not tell me how much she paid for the land or whether she had taken a loan to purchase it. She titled the land in her name, in part because she received a tax break and in part because it ensured safekeeping. The land remained a sale-in-waiting while it remained in her name. She also stressed she would

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never sell her lands without asking her husband’s permission, because not only would he be unhappy with her, but her whole family, including her brothers, would be unhappy with her. Savitri’s case reveals the uneven terrains of patriarchy. Savitri has multiple interests in land: She would not claim anshabanda so that she could protect her natal home as a safe, loving space, one which could provide protection in the event that her marriage failed, she purchased a plot of land in Biratnagar so she could live near higher-paying work and move away from the domestic pressures she felt in Saptari, and she purchased land on the East-West Highway to later sell to fund her daughter’s “good life,” including an education that could lead to a high-paying job and a marriage to a financially stable man. Savitri was like most women I met, acutely aware of the pressures of patriarchy and the pressures of marketization. For Savitri and her daughter to live a “good life,” she needed money. Given that her earnings and savings would not cover the costs of a “good life,” land became the primary means for her to access that “good life.” I met Ishita Deo, a young Madhesi Brahmin woman, at the Land Revenue Office. She was there to purchase a small plot of land in Rajbiraj. Originally from Biratnagar, she married into a family in rural Saptari, yet lives with her children in a rented room in Rajbiraj. Her husband, for the past two to three years, has lived and worked in Qatar. He sends approximately 30,000 rupees (300 USD) a month to Ishita, and she earns about 10,000 rupees (100 USD) a month from the farm work she helps with at her in-laws’ home in rural Saptari. I met her at her in-laws’, where she had been staying for several days. We talked about how and why she purchased land in Rajbiraj. Her paperwork said rajinama, or a sale, and she had taken a loan from a microfinance group to fund it.4 She purchased this land in Rajbiraj, near enough to her in-laws’ home that she could quickly travel to them to assist with farm and care work, and a short drive from her natal home of Biratnagar, so that she could stay connected to her family. However, she chose Rajbiraj primarily because she wanted to school her children there, “for their good lives and life improvement.” Her decisions 4  This particular microfinance group states it provides loans only for business purposes, such as purchasing materials for tailoring shops or food stalls. While this microfinance organization states it does not provide loans for land purchases, it frequently does. My conversations with and observations at this microfinance organization confirm that women take loans to purchase land with this organization. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter, women’s “empowerment” organizations such as microfinance groups are directly involved in marketization.

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to purchase land in Rajbiraj are directly connected to her desire to provide that “good life.” She plans to build her house within two to three years and is waiting for remittance money and loans in order to build that home. Ishita currently rents rooms in a family home in Rajbiraj, where she feels unhappy and insecure because her landlord complains to her about her children’s behavior. This, she feels, has limited her mobility and freedoms. Her precarious tenancy has motivated her to purchase and build as quickly as she can. A segment of our conversation is below: Beth: Can you tell us why it’s important for you to build a house? Ishita: For my own security (apna suraksha). Right now, I’m renting, the kids are happy, playing around, but if I get a house, I can live securely (surakshit). Even if there is waste or commotion, there’s no one to gripe at us, that’s why. …. B: So it sounds like in your apartment, there are some problems with your landlord? I: Yes. Always saying, always yelling at the boys about pumping [water], “Why are you pumping so hard! pump slowly! Why are you crying, why are you shouting? Be peaceful!” So because of this I want my own home. Ishita, like all the women I interviewed, saw land as the starting point to “good lives,” lives defined not only by class mobility but by the ability to love and care. This love and care is not only for her children, but for herself; she would be able to farm, and position herself in a way that she could be close enough to care for aging parents and in-laws while also being in her own house where she could mother as she wished. While Ishita does not necessarily intend to capitalize on this land, she hopes the land will provide both economic and social security. Ishita, who took a loan, and whose husband earned money from abroad to finance this land, views it as something that can protect against precarious tenancy. Ishita wants her own home to not only protect herself against her landlord but also to enable a degree of freedom for herself, as she and her husband navigate the financial demands of providing for a “good life” for her children. The social values of land fluctuate based on women’s life stages, family migration patterns, and caste. These social values coalesce with monetary values such that Ishita and Savitri both envisage land as enabling a “good life” for their children. Unlike Savitri and Ishita, both of whom have

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husbands and school-aged children, Pramila is widowed with adult children who work. When I inquired further about her finances, Pramila told me her sons, who are abroad, send money home and she also farms. She told me: My caste is Tharu, and for Tharus, they have to place a lot of faith (vishwas) in land capitalization (bhumipunjibad).5 For us, the land, we say the land is something like shudhadhan, the lineage of Buddha. Have you heard the name Gautam Buddha? Gautam Buddha’s father’s name was Shudhadhan. Purity (shudha) and rice paddy (dhaan), purity is a kind of energy. That’s Tharu. And because of that, for so long our relations have been grounded in farming, and so I farm in my off time.

For Pramila, like most women I met, understandings of land and land use, as well as connections to that land are deeply embedded in a sense of love, family, care, and caste. Pramila articulates that land capitalization (bhumipunjibad) is important to her, and this sentiment reflects how marketization shapes women’s interests in land. Importantly, Pramila situates her interests in caste-based notions of land and economic production. Pramila, who refused her shares of anshabanda, does not see anshabanda and land capitalization as antagonistic to each other. Rather, the refusal to claim anshabanda from her natal home and the determination to claim her deceased husband’s mohiyani hak land demonstrates how women engage the logics of marketization to protect against both marketization and family patriarchy. Land has a price, and that price matters to women. All 33 women I interviewed spoke to me about their monetary needs. Each woman needed money, not for herself, but for the support of her family and, particularly, to provide their children a “good life.” Nearly everyone spoke of the need to finance children’s education, healthcare, marriages, or labor migration costs in addition to utilities, food, and daily-life costs. Women purchased land so they could later sell or rent that land to pay for these costs, so that they might be closer to areas where they perceived they had better job opportunities, and so that their children would be afforded better educational opportunities. For all of the women whom I met and interviewed, land meant money, and money meant a better life; this is a common 5  Bhumi translates as earth or land, and punjibad as capitalism. In this context, land capitalization is the most appropriate translation.

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sentiment, but not everyone experiences this promise of a good life. Caste, as the next section shows, mediates these strategic (non)engagements in ways that blunt the angles of degrees of freedom.

The “Good Life,” Uninherited Women’s awareness and sensitivity to the pressures of neoliberal capitalism, particularly the need for money to fund welfare services for themselves and their children, is why women choose to title certain lands in their names but not others. It is in this pursuit of welfare, or a better life, that women make these decisions. However, the pursuit of a good life does not necessarily mean that a good life is attained. When it comes to the marketization of land, the intersections of caste and class can lead some women down the road to a better life and some women down the road to precarity. All of the women I spoke with saw the marketization of land as something which could better their lives or provide security. However, a “better life” is often an aspirational goal, one that many find difficult to attain. One afternoon in early 2019, I met a Dalit couple, Suresh and Devi, at the Land Revenue Office. They were accompanied by representatives of the Bhumi Adhikari Manch, the Land Rights’ Committee, a village-level action committee, connected to the Community Self Reliance Center, Nepal’s leading land rights organization based in Kathmandu. Suresh was an active member of the Bhumi Adhikari Manch. They were there to purchase one kattha (3645 square feet) to build a house on, and they planned to title it in Devi’s name. At the time, they lived in a small house on eilani jagga, or unregistered, government-owned land. The couple told me they were anxious about their living situation because, at any moment, the government could tear down their house without warning, and they would be left landless and homeless. Since their home was on a small roadway to India, it was a desirable plot of land, and they felt that losing their home was imminent.6 Suresh and Devi wanted to buy land as quickly as possible, and when they were approached by a landowner in their village about a plot of land for sale, they jumped at the opportunity.

6  In February 2020, dozens of homes in villages in their rural municipality were, in fact, torn down. Most of the occupants were Dalit. I do not know if the couple’s home was among those torn down.

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The landowner, whose fields Suresh and Devi had tilled, wanted to sell them a plot of his land to fund his granddaughter’s wedding. However, when Suresh and Devi went to the Land Revenue Office to obtain title, they learned that the landowners’ three sons had anshabanda. The sons’ consent to sell was important, though not required. Only two of the landowners’ sons agreed to sign off on the sale. Mahesh, the paralegal with whom Suresh and Devi worked, had cautioned the couple against proceeding with the purchase. The land, Mahesh mentioned, could be subjected to anshabanda claims in court, and years down the line they could find themselves in the midst of a court case, one which they might have to wait years to have resolved and possibly not in their favor. They could move forward, Mahesh said, but there was no guarantee they would be able to keep the land. The problem was that they had already paid for the land. Several weeks later, when I went to the Survey Department in the late afternoon to meet another woman whom I hoped to interview, I saw Suresh and Devi. Devi remained seated in the outdoor courtyard, and Suresh moved in between the courtyard and the building, trying to figure out how long they would need to wait. They were there that day to acquire maps to the land they had purchased. By the time I met them, they had been at the Survey Department for several hours. The landlord, they said, had not given them the title to the land. Suresh turned to me and shouted, “The wedding happened!” meaning that the landlord had taken their money without giving them the land. He picked up a nearby stick, crouched down, and started to draw out the plots of land. “He [the landlord] has 25 kattha (2 acres), and he owes us one. Our kattha is here,” he said as he drew a small rectangle within a larger rectangle to show where the couple’s plot should be, “but there’s an issue with the map, and he still refuses to give it!” He continued, “We paid in Phagun (February) and it’s Baishakh (April)!” Suresh and Devi, who did not have access to anshabanda land, turned to the land market to attain a “good life,” one which offered protection against caste-based landlessness and financial precarity. However, the specific ways by which anshabanda was marketized—provisionally sold for cash but potentially not legally transferable because one son would not authorize the sale—ensnared Suresh and Devi in a land market that could not deliver on its promises to free them from a class and caste-based landlessness.

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Conclusion As this chapter has suggested, in Nepal, marketization governs social action alongside other forms of gendered social organization. Women’s land ownership, however, does not necessarily translate into “empowerment” (Pradhan et  al. 2019). I have shown that the extension of legal rights to women has not meant that women, universally, want to claim those rights. Women’s entry point into land ownership is either through their natal homes—which as women suggested, might result in social isolation—or through the market, which may or may not deliver on its promise to protect against caste and class-based precarity. However, there is variation within women’s precarity. Ishita and Savitri contended with their own precarity as wives and mothers by purchasing land as an investment, Pramila contended with her precarity as a widow by claiming her husband’s, but not her father’s land, and Devi contended with her precarity as landless by purchasing a small plot of contestable land. Ishita, Savitri, Pramila, and Devi all arbitrate the social values of land: degrees of freedom from patriarchal domination for themselves and their children and degrees of freedom from state-led land dispossession. Women do what they can to make their lives livable under the conditions that both family patriarchy and market patriarchy create. However, whether women are successfully able to protect themselves depends on a variety of social forces including, but not limited to, caste structures. Future research on women and land marketization needs deeper engagement with the ways in which caste shapes women’s experiences and to what extent their positions are dependent on caste. The tension between anshabanda and other lands demonstrates that different forms of land ownership have different values to women and that these contradictory values tell us a lot about the importance of land to women. In thinking through women’s strategic (non)engagements in land markets, the limitations of questions about empowerment come into view. What feminist sociology tells us is that women, in the face of the constraints of neoliberal capitalism and patriarchal domination, act on their desires to gain degrees of freedom for themselves and for their children. In Nepal, and South Asia more broadly, where “women’s empowerment” discourses dominate socio-politics, it is critical to advance toward a locally grounded sociology of women’s land ownership. Importantly, this study helps to understand how women in Nepal navigate the terrains of (neo)liberal capitalism and postcolonial development practices.

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CHAPTER 4

“(Hindu) Workers of India, Unite!”: How Class Politics Shape the Consolidation of Right-Wing Hegemony in India Smriti Upadhyay

India’s largest labor union is the right-wing Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS). At the time of the last published official trade union verification by the Government of India, the BMS’s membership accounted for approximately one-third of workers who were unionized with one of the five major national-level federations in India (GOI 2006).1 The BMS’s For their generous feedback and for organizing the Contemporary South Asia Miniconference as well as this volume, I would like to thank Gowri Vijayakumar and Smitha Radhakrishnan. I would also like to thank Michael Levien for his thoughtful commentary on the chapter. 1  The five major labor union federations, known in India as Central Trade Union Organizations (CTUOs), included in this calculation are the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC), All-India Trade Union Congress (AITUC), Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), the Hind Mazdoor Sabha (HMS), and the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS).

S. Upadhyay (*) American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Radhakrishnan, G. Vijayakumar (eds.), Sociology of South Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97030-7_4

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presence spans the entire country and it is active in dozens of industries in both formal and informal sectors of the Indian economy. The BMS’s right-wing character is rooted in its position as one of the members of the family of Hindu nationalist organizations, known as the Sangh Parivar. Other prominent members of this family include the current ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and the fascist-inspired para-military volunteer corps and patriarch of the Hindu nationalist family, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Like other right-wing nationalist movements around the world, the Sangh claims to represent the interests of India’s majority ethno-religious group, Hindus, and excludes India’s minority religious groups from the bounds of the “Hindu nation.” While enforcing the exclusion of subordinated ethno-religious and racial groups is a central feature of right-wing movements like Hindu nationalism, this chapter will focus on how Hindu nationalists try to reconcile the class tensions that arise within the majoritarian group. More specifically, this chapter uses the BMS as a lens into how Hindu nationalists reconcile their claims of the ethno-religious superiority of Hindus with questions of class and capitalism. How do Hindu nationalists secure support from workers in class-specific ways, even as they make claims to represent a Hindu collective entity defined along cross-class lines? To answer this question, I use the concept of hegemony to theorize the efforts of the Hindu right-wing to secure support from workers and incorporate them into the cross-class collectivity of the “Hindu nation” through the BMS. The chapter takes inspiration from the rich engagement with the concept of hegemony in India (Guha 1997; Heller 1999; Bannerji 2002; Panikkar 2002; Desai 2002; Chatterjee 2011; Nilsen and Roy 2015). It seeks to extend these critical perspectives by exploring the hitherto understudied role of organized labor and working-class politics in the ascent of the Hindu right-wing in India. Through a historical investigation of the origins and the rise of the BMS within the Sangh Parivar, this chapter explores how the role of organized labor transforms over time in the process of consolidating hegemony. This historical perspective reveals two important findings. First, communism and capitalism, and therefore questions of labor and class politics, have played an important role in shaping the hegemonic project of Hindu nationalism, including its organizational forms, strategies for

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mobilizing support, and its ideologies pertaining to economic growth and national development. The relationship between the Hindu right and its leftist and centrist competitors has been complex and contradictory. The Hindu nationalist movement’s entry into the arena of working-class politics through the BMS took much inspiration from its competitors and even allied with them occasionally, while it simultaneously sought to neutralize the presence of Communist unions and dismantle the dominant position of Congress Party labor affiliates. This suggests the need to nuance some of the dominant narratives that explain the rise of the right as a function of the left’s decline and tend to focus on the right’s engagement with cultural politics as a way to attract support from lower classes. In this chapter, I demonstrate how the right-wing also creates its own idioms and practices of working-class politics, taking creative inspiration from, and sometimes even working in concert with, its opponents on the left. Second, as the labor wing of the Sangh Parivar, the BMS is the institutional manifestation of the Hindu right’s corporatist claims of an inherent unity and class-based integrity that exists within the Hindu nation. I argue that the BMS contributes to the consolidation of right-wing hegemony by mobilizing labor as a type of “citizen-worker” who is both empowered and disciplined, not merely as an input in economic production but also as an agent of national progress and economic development. Upholding these claims of unity across classes of Hindus is no easy feat. Despite—or rather because of—its size and its potential to politicize class divisions within the imagined entity of the Hindu nation, I argue that over time the BMS has become increasingly marginalized within the Hindu nationalist movement. Thus, the BMS gives us a lens into the class-based fissures within the hegemonic project of Hindu nationalism and reveals an important point of instability in the foundation of Hindu right-wing power. Drawing on a combination of primary source material, including published works by the BMS’s founder, Dattopant Thengadi, newspaper reports, interviews with BMS leaders in India conducted between 2013 and 2017, and secondary sources that have investigated the Sangh Parivar, this chapter constructs a history of the BMS within the Hindu right-wing hegemonic project from the union’s in 1955 to the present. This history uncovers an important temporal distinction in the process of consolidating right-wing power, between what I call “building hegemony,” which occurs prior to the capture of state power, and “maintaining hegemony,” which occurs once state power is captured. Each period of hegemonic consolidation comes with its own challenges and contradictions, as Hindu

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nationalists find ways to uphold the legitimacy of their hegemonic claims to represent the interests of all classes within the Hindu nation. As I shall demonstrate below, however, it is easier for Hindu nationalists to reconcile their cross-class ethnonationalist claims with the class-specific aims of the BMS when it is building its hegemonic power than when it has already captured state power and must maintain it. The chapter ends by contemplating how a sociological inquiry rooted in the theoretical traditions and empirical context of South Asia provides a fertile ground for developing a better understanding of how labor and class are central in both the constitution and potential disintegration of right-wing power.

Hindu Nationalism as a Right-Wing Hegemonic Project India’s Hindu nationalist movement offers a rich terrain on which a sociological understanding of right-wing power can be grounded. An early generation of scholarship exploring the late twentieth-century ascent of Hindu nationalism focused on the organizational features of the movement and its actors’ use of cultural and ethno-religious appeals in building mass support. Scholars detailed how, for instance, in the 1980s and 1990s, the Hindu nationalist movement’s nationwide campaign to build a Hindu temple on the site of a sixteenth-century mosque in the northern Indian city of Ayodhya was successful in unifying Hindus across a myriad of dividing lines, including ethnic and linguistic identities, devotional practices, caste, and class lines (Basu et al. 1993; Rajagopal 2001). This period also saw heightened violence that took the form of Hindu-Muslim rioting, violence toward other religious minorities in India like Christians, and campaigns for the “reconversion” of formerly low-caste Hindus who had converted to Islam or Christianity, known as ghar wapasi. These events, many scholars argue, were instrumental in unifying Hindus and catapulting the BJP to power as the head of a coalition government from 1999 to 2004. This was the first time in Indian history that a religious nationalist government was in power, a troubling sign for those who feared that the BJP’s historic victory had sounded the death knell of secularism in India. Alongside these works, which emphasize the central role of violent ethno-religious antagonism in the process of building popular support for Hindu nationalism, scholars have also offered rich insights into the role of political-economic forces in the rise of Hindu nationalism. India first

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enacted economic liberalization under a Congress-led government in 1991. After a brief flirtation with an economic vision that opposed liberalization, the BJP also quickly committed itself to the neoliberal agenda inaugurated by its opponent. Scholars who have explored the politics arising from the concomitant rise of Hindu nationalism and economic liberalization focus mostly on the class politics of the middle- and upper-­tiers of Indian society. Corbridge and Harriss (2000) call the twin rise of a pro-laissez-faire economic agenda and Hindu nationalism “elite revolts” of the well-heeled sections of Indian society who were poised to take advantage of the unbridling of market forces and the dismantling of state protections (like quotas for marginalized caste groups in public employment and educational institutions) promised by the BJP. Scholarship on Hindu nationalism has tended toward dichotomizing the right-wing’s mobilization of political support as either being oriented toward the economic interests of the elite or the cultural passions of the poor. However, more recent scholarship has focused on how the economic interests and grievances of lower-class groups also shape the politics of the BJP.  Scholars have uncovered how private welfare provisions disbursed through the non-parliamentary wings of the Sangh have generated support for the BJP from India’s predominantly poor electorate despite the party’s elite economic agenda (Thachil 2014; Chidambaram 2012; Jaffrelot 2005a). Thachil (2014, 284) argues that the Sangh’s welfare engagements were essential in moderating the elite image of the BJP and played a role in setting the stage for the party’s electoral victory in 2014. Other scholars have explored how these developmental claims have been used to muster support from lower-class groups who want to identify with the party’s self-projection as a catalyst for Indian modernity and progress (Desai and Roy 2016). This scholarship sheds light on how contemporary right-wing movements may also try to forge political bonds by making appeals to the economic interests and material conditions of lower-­ class groups. There is also a small but insightful literature in the Indian context that explores the rising popularity and power of the BJP using the framework of hegemony. Scholars have comparatively analyzed the contemporary right-wing hegemony led by the BJP with the earlier, ostensibly secular hegemonic project of territorial nationalism led by the Congress Party (Vanaik 2018). Others have zeroed in on the unique constellation of civil society organizations that Hindu nationalists have relied on to support the deep social and cultural transformations that are indicative of hegemonic

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projects. In an especially innovative example of such work, Rajagopal (2001) has argued that the use of state-run television to broadcast the Hindu epic Ramayan was a way of articulating the economic project of liberalization with the cultural project of religious nationalism. Other work has focused on how the new middle classes emerged out of India’s market reforms as a dominant class faction, which bolstered the hegemonic project of Hindu nationalism (Fernandes and Heller 2006). Scholars have also explored the Hindu right’s hegemony over subaltern groups like marginalized castes, religious minorities, and informal workers, highlighting how the ambivalent nature of the support for the Hindu right among these groups renders the right’s hegemony unstable (Desai and Roy 2016; Desai 2015). In these works, scholars have found that these strategies have not created “deep and stable preferences for Hindu nationalism” among poor voters (Thachil 2014, 27), nor have they led to the “clear hegemony of the BJP among subaltern groups” (Desai and Roy 2016, 26). While these findings are helpful in fleshing out Hindu right-­ wing hegemony, we still only have a partial view of the full ambit of this political project. Without studying the nearly seven decades-long effort by Hindu nationalists to mobilize workers through their labor union, the BMS, it is difficult to fully evaluate workers’ “preferences for Hindu nationalism” or the nature of the Hindu right-wing’s hegemony over workers. In this chapter, I contribute to this discussion by studying the BMS as a “junior partner” in the consolidation of  Hindu nationalist hegemony (Silver and Slater 1999). As the labor union wing of the Sangh, the BMS offers a view into one way that Hindu nationalists have attempted to integrate “the economic and political aims as well as intellectual and moral unity” that define hegemonic projects (Gramsci 1971, 182). By organizing labor as “citizen-workers,” the BMS has attempted to integrate its members into the Hindu nationalist hegemonic project by elevating them politically, socially, and spiritually as agents of progress and development. Secular nationalist labor leaders who organized workers as part of India’s post-colonial state  building project in the early twentieth century also used nationalism to secure workers’ cooperation with economic production while also empowering them as agents of national development (Nair 2016). The BMS sought to distinguish itself from these earlier efforts by incorporating a spiritual dimension into the articulated identity of the citizen-worker. As I show below, the BMS has had difficulties upholding

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both the distinction as well as the very integrity of the articulated identity of the Hindu national citizen-worker over time. Examining the role of organized labor uncovers a key temporal shift that occurs in the historic process of hegemonic consolidation: the capture of state power. Prior to the capture of state power, in the building phase of hegemonic consolidation, groups in the hegemonic bloc had to compete with prevailing ideologies and organizations while also trying to secure consent among the groups over whom they hoped to exercise hegemony. In this period, the different members of the Hindu right’s hegemonic bloc, represented by the Sangh Parivar, were constrained externally by the actors who dominated the area of civil society in which Hindu nationalists tried to build power. Internally, however, within the Sangh, I argue that there was greater flexibility in adhering to (or ignoring) certain ideological tenets of Hindu nationalism, such as the rejection of class conflict or the sanctions against strikes and other disruptive displays of working-class power. Drawing from Gramsci’s (1971, 264–65) discussion of how political parties manage the ties with their civil society allies in the process of consolidating power, I describe the BMS’s orientation to labor politics in this period of building hegemony as “progressive.” I argue that this “progressive” character emerged in the building phase because civil society organizations of the hegemonic bloc could operate without worrying that their activities might contradict or thwart the aims of the ruling party to govern the economy and to remain in power. If the BMS breached the ideological commitment to class compromise in the building phase and decided to go on strike, for instance, the disruption to production it would have caused would be less threatening to the Hindu right because its power was not yet tethered to the BJP’s ability to govern the economy. The transition from building to maintaining hegemony is messy and violent. In Gramscian terms, this is a “chaotic interregnum,” a period of crisis in which “the old is dying and the new cannot be born” (Gramsci 1971, 276; Arrighi and Silver 1999; Arrighi 2009). Gramsci described the “morbid symptoms” associated with this period, including mass upheavals and violence. In the case of India, this interregnum occurred during a two-decade-long period from the late 1970s to the late 1990s. Some of the social morbidities of this time included the suspension of democratic freedoms by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the Congress’s gradual abandonment of secular commitments especially under the governments of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, and heightened communal and caste-based violence in the 1980s and 1990s (Varshney and Wilkinson 2006). For the

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Sangh Parivar, this was a period where the different aims of its “junior partners” began to collide with one another as well as with the leading sections of the hegemonic bloc, in this case the RSS and the BJP. In the maintenance phase, which is ongoing, Hindu nationalists are at the helm of state power. They have inherited the responsibility of ensuring that class relations are smooth and can support capitalist accumulation without major disruptions. This puts forth a new set of challenges for the Hindu nationalist hegemonic bloc. Now, the BJP must ensure that the allied groups and partners with whom it worked to build hegemony remain on board, even if the aims of these different  allied entities  are threatened by, or are in conflict with, the aims of the ruling party. When the allied group is organized labor, I argue, the challenge of regulating the relationship between different partners in the hegemonic project is particularly acute. This is because labor has the power to disrupt economic production, which is central to maintaining the material bases of consent as well as the legitimacy of the ideological claims that the hegemonic project represents the interests of all class groups bound within the Hindu national collective identity. In order to address the risk of disrupting production in this period of maintaining hegemony, the BMS has adopted what I call a “regressive” orientation toward labor politics where the union has become less vocal (and more silenced) in its criticism of the economic agenda of the governing party. This chapter examines the dynamics of Hindu nationalism’s hegemonic consolidation across three main periods. After an initial widening of the scope of the Hindu nationalist project, which is outlined in the following section, the chapter then examines how the BMS transformed from being a key partner in the building phase of Hindu nationalist hegemony where it had a “progressive” orientation in organizing workers (1948 to 1977) to moving to the backstage as a facilitator of the large-scale cultural campaigns organized by the Sangh during a chaotic transition period (1977 to 1998). Finally, in the maintenance phase of Hindu right-wing hegemony (1999 to the present), the BMS has become one of the largest mass Hindu nationalist organizations within the Sangh Parivar but also one of the more troublesome, as the union’s anti-liberalization position and its earlier “progressive” orientation toward mobilizing support from workers is now in conflict with the aims of the staunchly pro-liberalization BJP government.

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Universalizing but Not Hegemonic: The Partial Plane of Hindu Nationalism (1925–1948) As propounded by its founders in the early twentieth century, Hindu nationalism began as a cultural project to strengthen Hindu identity in India in the face of what was perceived to be a growing political assertiveness of Indian Muslims in the late colonial period (Sarkar 2002). The larger ambitions to transform Hindu nationalism into the “universal plane” on which economic and political aims became integrated with intellectual and moral unity (Gramsci 1971, 182) only developed in the mid-twentieth century. Keshav Balram Hedgewar, a dominant-caste (Brahmin) man, established the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in Nagpur in 1925 to give concrete organizational form to the ideas of early Hindu nationalist ideologues like Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. Hedgewar wanted the RSS to remain distant from the arena of formal politics. Instead, he focused on what he considered to be a fundamental precondition for Indian independence: the awakening and cementing of a religious national solidarity among Hindus. To this end, Hedgewar established shakhas, or local branches of the RSS, that would become the primary site for inculcating in Hindus a “burning devotion for Bharat (the Hindu nationalist nation-­ state) and its national ethos” (Golwalkar 1966). Ostensibly, shakhas set no barrier to entry along caste or class lines, although their actual participants were often young men of upper or middle caste backgrounds from well-­ to-­do families (Curran 1951; Andersen and Damle 1987; Jaffrelot 1996). The activities organized within shakhas were the same throughout India to replicate the sense of unity that Hindu nationalists promoted in their ideology (Andersen and Damle 1987; Jaffrelot 1996). Hindu nationalism thus certainly aimed to be universalizing in this early period, but Hedgewar’s disavowal of parliamentary politics and the lack of vision for the economy meant that it did not have the political and economic foundation to develop hegemonic aspirations. In 1948 the RSS was banned by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru after one of its former members assassinated Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi. The ban created a deep crisis of legitimacy for the organization. The RSS’s connection to Gandhi’s assassin made it the target of widespread public anger and ostracization. This exacerbated a lack of confidence that had begun to emerge from within the Hindu nationalist movement in the early 1940s when a section of the RSS cadre questioned the strategy of focusing

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exclusively on individual-level character development within the RSS’s shakha network as the primary means of establishing Hindu nationalism in India. This “activist” faction of the RSS cadre wished to see the organization adopt a wider program that included organizing different groups such as students, peasants, civil servants, and also workers, in order to exert a wider influence on Indian society (Andersen and Damle 1987). Among the activists were young men who had joined the RSS in response to Golwalkar’s call in 1942 to increase the number of full-time organizers (pracharaks2). Some were even once supporters (or sympathizers) of the left but were disappointed by the Communist Party of India’s (CPI) decision to collaborate with colonial authorities during World War II (Andersen and Damle 1987). Opposing the “activists” were a group of “traditionalists” who were suspicious of extending the RSS’s scope too widely (Andersen and Damle 1987). M.S. Golwalkar, who led the RSS during its first major crisis of legitimacy, eventually ceded to the activists, in part to prevent their further desertion from the RSS and in part to improve the public image of the organization. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the activist cadre of the RSS got to work building a Hindu nationalist presence in civil society. Several major Hindu nationalist outfits were established in this period as different arms of the RSS. The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) was established in 1949 as the student’s wing, the Jan Sangh Party (precursor to the Bharatiya Janata Party, BJP) was established in 1951 as the parliamentary front, and the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS) was established in 1955 as the labor union wing. Figure 4.1 depicts the organizational structure of the Hindu nationalist family of organizations, the Sangh Parivar.

2  Pracharaks represent a high level of commitment as they are expected to denounce their personal commitments to their families and careers and maintain celibacy. They are sometimes described within the RSS as “missionaries” for Hindu nationalism. They are typically thought to be charismatic and upstanding examples of the ideal Hindu nationalist citizen in addition to the work of expanding and reproducing Hindu nationalism across its different civil society arms. Pracharaks are an invaluable resource for Hindu nationalist organizing because they are well-connected members of the RSS cadre. As such, they are often deployed to work as organizing secretaries in the different organizations of the Sangh Parivar.

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The Political Party Wing: Bharatiya Janata Party

The Women’s Wing: Rashtriya Sevika Samiti

The Religious Wing: Vishwa Hindu Parishad

Central command: The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh

The Student Wing: Akhil Bharatiya Vidhyarthi Parishad

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The Tribal Welfare Wing: Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram

The Educational Wing: Vidhya Bharati

The Labor Wing: Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh

Fig. 4.1  The organization of the Sangh Parivar (not all members are pictured). Diagram by author

The Labor of Building Hegemony: The BMS’s “Progressive” Orientation to Organizing Labor (1948–1977) The establishment of the BMS and its sister organizations within the Sangh Parivar gave Hindu nationalists the civil society presence needed to pursue their hegemonic aspirations. At the helm of this hegemonic project were the RSS and the Jan Sangh. While some sections of the Jana Sangh leadership, like its founder Syama Prasad Mukherjee, focused on winning elections, other party members, especially those who had backgrounds as RSS cadre, envisioned a broader “constructive programme for cultural, social, and economic regeneration […] and for building a sound and stable political structure on the basis of democracy” (quoted in Jaffrelot 1996, 121). According to the constructive program, each arm of the Sangh Parivar would work to fortify group solidarity to Hindu nationalism in their respective arena of civil society. An important component of this work

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included opposing the influence of communism, which was considered unsuitable for “Bharatiya” culture on account of its alleged sympathies to foreign powers and its advocation for a “classless society” (Golwalkar 1966). The BMS thus formed part of the front lines of the Hindu right-­ wing ideological offensive against communism, since the labor movement was ripe with communist influences in the earlier part of the twentieth century. The RSS had taken decisive measures to oppose communism under the leadership of Golwalkar even before the BMS’s establishment, however. Golwalkar was eager to establish a strong Hindu nationalist presence in what he considered to be hostile territory for the movement, Kerala. The southern state was home to large populations of the two groups that were deemed to be Hindu nationalism’s most troubling enemies: communists and religious minorities (Muslims and Christians) (Golwalkar 1966). One of Golwalkar’s closest proteges, Dattopant Thengadi, an RSS pracharak from the activist ranks, was sent to Calicut (Kozhikode) in the Malabar region in 1942. Malabar was fertile ground for socialist and communist mobilizing. Thengadi offered Golwalkar first-hand accounts of the potency of communist organizing on the ground, which he considered the “enemy number one” of Hindu nationalism (Jaffrelot 1996). It is perhaps unsurprising that with this exposure to grassroots communist organizing and radical class politics it was Thengadi who founded the BMS a little over a decade after his experience in Kerala. Thengadi announced the plans to form a national labor union federation that could “rise above the argument of class-struggle, think from the point of view of national integrity, and keep aloof from the un-Indian tendencies of Capitalism and Communism” at a meeting of the Bharatiya Jan Sangh (BJS) in 1955 (quoted in Graham 1990, 170). To fulfill this vision, Thengadi made a concerted effort to indigenize the founding narratives and symbolism of the union compared to the “foreign” symbols adopted by Indian communists and socialists. The date of the union’s official promulgation, July 23, 1955, was chosen to commemorate the birth anniversary of (Lokmanya) Bal Gangadhar Tilak, an Indian nationalist revered by the BMS as the first modern and decidedly non-­ communist labor organizer in the country. Instead of celebrating workers on May 1 as other unions in India (and elsewhere in the world) do, the BMS celebrates workers on Vishwakarma Jayanti, the day of celebrations for Vishwakarma, the Hindu god of craftsmanship and engineering.

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In BMS offices across the country, an image of Vishwakarma sits alongside a portrait of Dattopant Thengadi and an image of Bharat Mata (the Hindu nationalist depiction of “Mother India”). As part of the BMS’s pantheon, Vishwakarma represents a deified Hindu nationalist citizen-­ worker, the “origin of all laboring and industrial classes…the builder of the earth as well as of Heaven” (D. B. Thengadi 1981, 69). In the BMS’s interpretation of Vedic mythology, Vishwakarma was asked by the Hindu Lord Indra to manufacture a weapon to kill Vishwakarma’s own son, Vritra, who was wreaking havoc in the kingdom of the gods. In this predicament, Vishwakarma dutifully obliged by producing the weapon that took his son’s life in an act of “sincere cooperation…for the sake of the nation” (D.  B. Thengadi 1981, 69–73). Thus, far from being a mere laborer bogged down by the mundane interests of his own class (or even his own personal life) or an oppressed political subject of Lord Indra, in the BMS’s ideology, Vishwakarma represents an empowered Hindu patriot who devoted his labor for the higher purpose of saving the nation. The BMS’s brand of class empowerment is intimately linked to its nationalist views. The Hindu nationalist rendition of the slogan “Workers of the world, unite!” is “Workers, unite the world!” In the BMS’s view, this places greater agency on the worker as a force for unification, not just of his class but for the more transcendental and sacred force of uniting a collectivity larger than the worker (in this case, the world).3 Similarly, a common refrain used by leftist unions in India is “kamane-wala khayega!” (he who earns shall eat) while the BMS prefers the slogan “kamane-wala khilayega!” (he who earns shall feed others).4 According to these slogans, Hindu national citizen-workers are thus not merely a class for themselves but rather a class for something larger than themselves—a class for the Hindu nation. In practice, however, it was harder for the BMS to distinguish itself from its competitors practically than it could ideologically through its construction of the spiritually elevated Hindu national citizen-worker. Thengadi himself worked with the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC) as an organizing secretary before he established the BMS (Jaffrelot 1996). Throughout the 1960s, the BMS found itself in close and cooperative quarters with leftist unions as it tried to expand its own membership. In 1963, the BMS worked with the socialist Hind Mazdoor 3 4

 Interview, 14 August 2013, Vadodara, Gujarat.  Interview, 14 August 2013, Vadodara, Gujarat.

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Sabha (HMS) in Bombay to organize bank workers (Andersen and Damle 1987). In the late 1970s, BMS leaders met in Delhi with the leaders of two unions with socialist sympathies, the Hind Mazdoor Sangh and the Hind Mazdoor Panchayat, to discuss a potential merger. The BMS put forth four conditions for the merger: (1) independence from political parties, (2) rejection of class struggle, (3) acceptance of Vishwakarma Jayanti as national worker’s day, and (4) rejection of the red flag of communists as the banner of the union. There was agreement on the first three conditions, but the two parties could not come to an agreement on the question of the red flag (Andersen and Damle 1987). The merger was eventually abandoned by the BMS, but its attempt suggests that the BMS was making efforts to build and normalize its presence within the labor movement. It also reflects a willingness by unions with leftist ideological commitments to (conditionally) accept the BMS, despite the BMS’s affiliation to the RSS and its Hindu nationalist commitments. This type of collaboration with its opponents, even in defiance of the ideological tenets of Hindu nationalism, is one dimension of the BMS’s “progressive” orientation in the building phase of hegemony. The BMS’s “progressive” approach can also be seen in the way it leverages its relatively late start within the labor movement. The Congress-­ affiliated Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC), which was established in 1947, and the Communist Party of India-affiliated All-India Trade Union Congress (AITUC), which was established in 1920, had more than a decade-long “head start” over the BMS. Yet, there were some advantages to the BMS’s position as a latecomer: It was able to observe, dabble, and imbibe in successful organizing strategies and also identify the failures or shortcomings faced by its competitors. Indeed, as much as the BMS forged alliances and learned from leftist traditions and practices of class politics, it also tried to grow in the spaces of neglect in the left-­ dominated terrain of the Indian labor movement. In other words, it was from this latecomer vantage point that the BMS leadership was able to identify an important gap in the dominant traditions of the Indian labor movement: the exclusion of informal workers. Already in the 1970s, at least a decade before some of the major informal workers’ unions emerged in the Indian labor movement (Agarwala 2013), Thengadi, the BMS’s chief ideologue expressed the need to organize informal workers who had historically been excluded from many of the major labor union federations. In a collection of essays penned in the early 1970s, Thengadi pondered the puzzling situation in which the

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Indian labor movement has developed with the aim of protecting “the down-trodden, the poor, and the exploited” in the country but has neglected to include the very workers most in need of this protection. The attention of our trade unions has been mainly towards the plight of workers in organized industries. This is natural and justifiable on the grounds of necessity, practicality, and utility. These industries cause the concentration of the labor force which facilitates the growth of trade unionism. But in industries and occupations that are not so organized, the need for workers’ organization is still greater. This is the paradoxical situation. Those who are in need of greater protection are least protected either by trade unionism or by legislation. (D. Thengadi 1972, 80, emphasis in original)

In these writings, Thengadi goes on to reflect on the predicament of several groups of informal workers, including sub-contracted construction workers, forest workers, artisans, social workers, domestic laborers, and even pensioners. There were scattered attempts to organize informal workers and to expand the category of the “Hindu national citizen-­ worker” across the BMS’s subnational units,5 but as we shall see shortly, the BMS’s “progressive” orientation toward informal workers was rerouted during the period of transition between building and maintaining right-wing hegemony. Though it was INTUC that was the largest labor union in the country, for the BMS, dislodging INTUC from its top position also required contending with the threat of communism. As we have seen above, the “red threat” was not just an obstacle to overcome, but it also represented a creative force for Hindu nationalist labor leaders. This force propelled the BMS to oppose leftist influences symbolically, through the creation and propagation of a unique set of working-class divinities, narratives, and slogans. But the force of communism also pushed the BMS to attempt collaboration with its leftist and centrist competitors. These attempts were sometimes difficult to see to fruition, but they nevertheless reflected the BMS’s desire to become a household name in the Indian labor movement. They also highlight that the BMS was able to exercise some agency in 5  BMS leaders from Gujarat who were active in organizing workers in the state in the 1960s and 1970s told me about several struggles waged in the early 1970s on behalf of sub-contracted employees in large public-sector undertakings, such as the Indian Petrochemicals Corporation Limited (IPCL) and the Oil and National Gas Corporation (ONGC). Interview 13 April 2016, Vadodara, Gujarat.

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deciding how to navigate its respective arena of civil society, even if it sometimes meant flouting the Hindu nationalist ideological principles enshrined by the central command of the movement, the RSS (See Fig. 4.1 ). These “progressive” strategies appeared to have helped the BMS in the building phase of Hindu nationalist hegemony. By the end of the 1970s, the BMS’s share of the total trade union membership had surpassed AITUC’s share and was steadily catching up with INTUC (Srivastava 2001).6

The Chaos of Hegemonic Transition: The BMS in Between the “Rock” of the Economy and the “Hard Place” of Culture (1978–1998) In the chaotic period of transition between building and maintaining right-wing hegemony, the BMS found itself in a curious position in which it continued to grow in size within the labor movement, but despite—or perhaps because of—this expanding base of workers organized under its auspices, it faded to the background within the Hindu nationalist movement. I argue that as Hindu nationalists inched closer to the capture of state power in this period, tensions within the Sangh Parivar became more fraught, revealing hairline fractures along class lines on the “universal plane” of Hindu nationalism. The class tensions appeared at two different levels. One level of tension emerged around the sharing of resources within the Sangh Parivar during the large-scale religious mobilization spearheaded by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP). The VHP’s campaigns became a top priority for the Sangh Parivar and thus commanded much of the Hindu nationalist movement’s resources. This left other Sangh members, like the BMS, with slimmer pickings in terms of resourcing its own initiatives. Second, tensions became expressed more directly between the pro-liberalization faction of the Sangh, represented by the BJP, and the anti-liberalization faction, represented by the BMS, over the plans to initiate India’s neoliberal turn in the early 1990s. There was no ideological conflict for the BMS in supporting the VHP’s initiatives like the Ram Janmabhoomi campaign, but it did present a conflict of interests for the union. As we saw in the previous section, in the 1970s, the BMS had expressed an interest in expanding among workers 6  Of course, the BMS also benefited from the splintering off of AITUC when the Communist Party of India (Marxist) CPM formed its trade union federation, the Centre for Indian Trade Unions (CITU) in 1970.

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who had largely been excluded from labor unions. The priority given to the VHP and the religious initiatives it was leading meant that the BMS had to put its own plans for expansion as well as its more routine activities, like annual meetings, on hold. As Jaffrelot (2005b) reports, the BMS voiced its desire to strengthen the union’s network of labor organizers to support its plans for expansion, but its request for more human resources to fuel this effort went unheeded by the RSS. The RSS made it clear that the BMS could not rely on pracharaks being deputed to work for the union while the VHP rolled out its religious campaigns. Since all pracharak hands were needed on the VHP’s deck, the BMS was informed that it would need to generate its own human resources for its expansionary pursuits among workers (Jaffrelot 2005b, 364). Despite the constraints on resources, there was nevertheless a concerted effort from all members of the Sangh to support the campaigns for religious mobilization undertaken in the 1980s and 1990s. In preparation for the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, the BMS rescheduled its Ninth All-India Conference to ensure that workers would be free to volunteer their labor for the cause (Saxena 1993). BMS workers took part in the nationwide rath yatra (chariot procession), organized by Lal Krishna Advani in 1990, and in the kar seva (volunteer work), elicited for the mosque demolition (Saxena 1993). The BMS also defended the demolition of the Babri Masjid in the pages of its weekly journals and actively protested the arrest of members who had participated in the mosque destruction. In the aftermath of the violent demolition of the Babri Masjid, the Indian government placed a ban on the RSS in 1992. Organizations like the BMS could continue their activities during the ban, but there was another difficulty brewing within the Sangh due to divergent ideological positions within the hegemonic bloc on the important question of the economy. The BMS had always been closely aligned with the economic vision articulated in the Hindu nationalist philosophy of Integral Humanism, which drew inspiration from Gandhian ideals of swadeshi and included promoting decentralized, village-based economic production and indigenous industries to achieve economic self-sufficiency. To further strengthen the Sangh’s anti-liberalization thrust, Thengadi, the BMS’s founder, established a platform to “awaken” the national commitment to swadeshi, or the Swadeshi Jagran Manch (SJM), in 1994. There was a hope that the BMS’s success, evidenced in part by its rise to the number one position within the Indian labor movement, would allow the

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anti-­liberalization thrust shared by the BMS and the SJM, “to make a much bigger splash in the countryside than the RSS-sponsored programs related to Ayodhya” (Sonwalkar 1994). The BJP’s commitment to swadeshi was short-lived. Already by 1992, it began to recast swadeshi as the economic platform of a “self-confident nation that can deal with the world,” not the timorous economic program of an “inward looking nation, afraid to face an increasingly complex and aggressive world” (quoted in Thachil 2014, 52). Once the BJP abandoned its support for protectionist economic nationalism, class-based tensions beneath the surface of the Hindu nationalist “universal plane” became apparent. In this transition from building to maintaining right-wing hegemony, the fading strength of the communist threat meant that the BMS was no longer a vanguard in the ideological offensive that was launched in the building phase of hegemony. The religious mobilization that took off during the transition phase did not pose an ideological conflict for the BMS, but it nevertheless resulted in the subordination of the union as a stagehand of sorts to the more sensational religious violence orchestrated by the VHP. The BMS’s sidelining within the Sangh Parivar, coupled with the BJP’s abandonment of its swadeshi commitments, made it difficult for the BMS to uphold the integrity of the Hindu nationalist  “universal plane”, that is, the  Sangh’s claim that Hindu nationalism could accommodate the interests of its working class members. At the same time, the union’s growing numbers also meant that there was a growing mass of BMS members who had been elevated and empowered as Hindu national citizen-workers in the building phase, who now threw their support behind the anti-liberalization thrust of the BMS.

The Challenge of Maintaining Hegemony: The BMS’s Regressive, but Conflicted, Relationship to Power (1999 to the Present) The BJP won elections again in 1999, moving deeper into the phase of maintaining hegemony. With the BJP more stably in control of state power this time, the party faced the challenge of reconciling the divergent aims and objectives of all the civil society groups that participated in building right-wing power with its own interests to remain in power. The conflicting class interests between the pro-liberalization BJP and the

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anti-­liberalization BMS, a conflict that began to rear its head at the end of the transition phase, only became more difficult to manage in this more advanced moment of hegemonic consolidation. The discord on the question of the economy makes clear that the Sangh Parivar is riddled with competing objectives and even conflicting ideologies. While the RSS was not a stranger to internal strife, earlier struggles were confined to a relatively small group within the organization (i.e., traditionalists versus activists). Now, however, the challenge mounted against liberalization from within the ranks of the Sangh had become weightier and more troublesome. The BMS, who by 2002, represented a base of over 6 million workers, also had the mass support of the Sangh’s farmer’s wing, the Bharatiya Kisan Sangh (BKS), and the SJM, all of whom opposed liberalization within the Sangh. Thus, with the BJP in power at the national level, this criticism of economic liberalization revealed internal fissures within the Hindu nationalist movement that were amplified due to the mass base that the movement had acquired while building its hegemony. Moreover, since these fissures reflected economic grievances, they also had the potential to resonate with the discontent of other groups outside of the Hindu nationalist movement who shared similar grievances. The BMS’s Thengadi emerged as a vocal critic of the Vajpayee-led BJP government, which was in power from 1999 to 2004. “Vajpayee is capable enough to lead the developing world against dictates of developed nations,” Thengadi said, “but he is surrounded by a coterie of unworthy advisors and is too busy in petty politics” (Times of India 1999). Accusing the Vajpayee government of subservience to the “economic imperialism of the United States,” Thengadi proposed that India quit the World Trade Organization (WTO). In this protest against the WTO, the BMS once again worked in alliance with leftist unions as it had done in the past. Thengadi also elicited support from outside of the Sangh from Communists like W.R. Varadarajan of the Communist Party of India’s (Marxist) labor affiliate, the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), and Manohar Deshkar of the CPI’s labor affiliate AITUC. Together, they participated in rallies in New Delhi and Maharashtra in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Date 2001). The BMS continued to pursue strategic alliances with the left as it had throughout the earlier phases of hegemonic consolidation. In the maintenance phase, however, the strategic alliances pursued with the left were riskier because they threaten the movement’s capture of power and the internal cohesion on which this power is premised. The attempts to build

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alliances with the leftist unions in opposition to the BJP’s pursuit of economic liberalization made evident a potential basis for solidarity on an economic plane that could be even more “universal” than the “universal plane” of Hindu nationalism. The BJP was voted out of power in 2004. For some scholars, this was a vote against the party’s elite-oriented economic mandate, which did little to check the growing material deprivation and inequality that resulted from the unbridling of market forces. For others, it was an indication that the BJP and the rest of the Sangh had gone too far in offending the secular sensibilities of the Indian electorate (Yadav 2004; Shastri et al. 2009). I argue that the BJP’s ousting from power also underscores an important feature of hegemonic consolidation: Even when state power lies in the hands of the party, hegemony is not guaranteed but must continually be maintained against a myriad of persistent threats and tensions related to both economic and cultural aspects of the BJP’s rule. Indeed, the capture of state power does not imply that hegemonic actors have managed to cast a spell of consent over a restive population whom the party can dominate effortlessly. Rather, the work of maintaining power, to borrow from Stuart Hall (2016, 169, emphasis added), should be understood as “having the capacity to actively contain, educate and reshape oppositional forces, to maintain them in their subordinate places.” In the early years of maintaining hegemony, there was evidently more learning to do on the part of the BJP and the Sangh Parivar in terms of containing, reshaping, and subordinating oppositional forces. In 2014, the party won a landslide election under the leadership of Narendra Modi, who ran on a developmentalist and anti-corruption platform. Once again in 2019, the BJP was victorious, winning even more seats and a greater percentage of the popular vote. Even more impressive perhaps is the fact that the BJP’s victory in 2019 came on the heels of widespread economic distress among the predominantly poor Indian electorate and economic mismanagement under the first Modi government. In this more advanced moment of maintaining hegemony, the BMS’s opposition has become more muted than it was in the earlier phases of hegemonic maintenance. While BMS union leaders occasionally release damning media bytes or organize demonstrations against some of the economic policies of the BJP-led government (Nanda 2017; The Hindu 2015; The Wire 2020), the union often abstains from collective actions with other labor unions. Instead, it opts to voice criticism and organize protests independently of other unions. We thus see a shift from the BMS’s

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“progressive” character during the building phase to a more “regressive” one in the maintenance phase. With the historical view of the BMS’s earlier, sharper resistance against economic liberalization in mind, such responses from the union leadership certainly appear diluted. Yet, it would be incorrect to view the BMS as merely a puppet of the BJP. This would deny the agency of rank-and-file members of the BMS who are struggling with and resisting the current economic policies of the Hindu nationalist government in more local and everyday forms. Furthermore, as we have seen, the BMS has opposed the BJP government’s espousal of economic liberalization under Vajpayee in the early years of the maintenance phase of right-wing hegemony. In this period, the BMS became “Vajpayee’s bugbear,” since its leader, Thengadi, had earned the full confidence of the RSS’s chief at the time, K.S. Sudarshan, in pursuing an anti-liberalization swadeshi agenda (Ramaseshan 2020). Also in the maintenance phase, a handful of BJP politicians, including Narendra Modi who at the time was a general secretary of the party, circulated a statement disapproving of Thengadi’s criticism of Vajpayee’s economic policies. This statement was a harbinger of the estrangement between the BJP and the BMS that has now become even more pronounced (Ramaseshan 2020). It was upon the BJP’s return to power, after having fallen in 2004, that the BMS became quieter in its opposition. In this sense, the BMS’s silence may have been reflective of a more concerted effort on the part of the BJP to contain and subordinate internal opposition after seeing that threats to its power could come from within its own family. To further elucidate the mechanisms through which the BMS became sidelined, it is necessary to examine how BMS leaders today are supported or hindered in their activities during the maintenance phase. This is difficult to observe directly at the national level. The executive leadership of the union closely adheres to the official rhetoric of the Sangh Parivar and maintains a guarded distance with respect to other Hindu nationalist organizations, especially the BJP. By focusing on the union’s actions at the national level, however, this chapter has pointed to an important change over time in the BMS’s exercise of its critical voice. I have argued that this change is reflective of a concerted effort to quiet the union in response to a larger insecurity that the ruling sections of the Hindu nationalist hegemonic bloc had around its ability to keep a lid on simmering class conflict. It is also reflective of a recognition that the BMS itself could become a vehicle for the further politicization of class inequality and heightened economic insecurity.

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Moreover, the BMS’s marginalization within the Hindu nationalist movement should not be taken as a sign of the declining salience of class politics or the unambiguous triumph of identity politics. Instead, I would argue that rather than indicating a weakness, the BMS’s position in the shadows of the hegemonic bloc of the Sangh Parivar reflects the union’s ability to challenge the hegemonic claim of universality of Hindu nationalism along class lines, which is key to bolstering the legitimacy of right-­ wing power.

Toward a Sociology of South Asia—Lessons from the Hindu Right-Wing in India This chapter has traced a change over time in the BMS’s role within the larger project of consolidating Hindu nationalist hegemony. The BMS’s foundation gave the Hindu nationalist leaders more reach in Indian civil society. It also propelled the initial widening of Hindu nationalism from a cultural project of elite Hindus to a hegemonic project seeking more profound change in multiple spheres of social and political life in India. Within this process, the BMS has moved from having a progressive orientation in terms of organizing support from workers in the building phase of hegemony, to its more passive position as an understudy in the violent cultural turn taken by the movement in a chaotic period of transition, to a regressive, but conflicted position where its criticism and contention has become quieter, but also perhaps more contained by the Hindu nationalist leadership. Will the BMS be used to maintain a lid on resistance stemming from growing class inequality and economic hardships among workers in India, including from within the working-class ranks of the Sangh Parivar? How will the BMS respond to the Modi government’s unabashed dilution of protections for workers through large-scale labor law reforms? As in the earlier chaos of the transition from building to maintaining hegemony in the late 1970s to the early 1990s, today we are again seeing a potential for colliding interests and aims between the BMS, who must be accountable to the economic interests of its growing rank-and-file base, and the BJP, who is dismantling labor protections while also putting great energy and resources into furthering the Hindutva cultural agenda through increasingly coercive means. Observing class politics within the Hindu nationalist movement is of vital importance in assessing future outcomes. Depending

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on how these internal tensions around questions of class are addressed, either the BMS could represent a key stabilizing force for the Hindu nationalist hegemonic project or it could be a flashpoint for contention and perhaps even a harbinger of hegemonic decline. Studying the BMS and the role of working-class politics within the Hindu nationalist movement in India offers important sociological insights to further our theoretical understanding of right-wing political power. For Hindu nationalists, consolidating hegemonic positions required that they not only build a defense against secularism, but that they also construct an offense (in the form of an alternative economic vision) to the one offered by opposing political forces, including the Congress and Communists. Building and maintaining a Hindu nationalist vision for the economy has perhaps been one of the most challenging aspects for the Sangh Parivar in its efforts to consolidate power, but this does not mean that questions of class and capitalism are not important for right-wing projects that mobilize support along the cross-class axes of ethno-religious identity. Thus, even right-wing projects asserting the dominance of an ethno-religious majoritarian identity group also have to engage with the politics of class and with questions of labor and development. As illustrated by the case of the BMS in India, right-wing movements can develop their own practice of working-class politics, and they can learn many of these lessons from leftist movements in moments and places where the left is active and strong. Indeed, leftist forces have surprisingly been a constructive force for the BMS. Even today, though communism has a far smaller and more localized presence in India, Hindu nationalists continue to expand their own organization in response to the perceived threat of communism.7 This highlights the importance of a temporal view of right-wing power. While it may be the case that the right’s current ascent has been enabled by the current weakness of the left, there are a host of processes that the right-wing undertakes in different moments, including emulating, allying, and learning from the left, that prepares the right for the consolidation of hegemony. Furthermore, as highlighted in this chapter, a historical understanding of right-wing power also 7  A few years before his death in 2004, Thengadi established a BMS affiliate for tribal workers, the Vanvasi Mazdoor Sangh. The initiative was inspired in part by the BMS’s longstanding desire to expand among informal workers. In part, however, the Vanvasi Mazdoor Sangh also represents an attempt to prevent Maoist encroachments among tribal workers, as one veteran BMS leader told me (Interview, 8 January 2017, Ratlam Madhya Pradesh).

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demonstrates that the challenges do not always emerge from external opponents but can also emerge internally from within the right-wing. Moreover, I have suggested that in different moments in the historical process of building and maintaining power, the configuration of resistance changes and becomes harder to resolve. In this way, through the specific study of the BMS, we are in fact able to uncover a more general feature of the right-wing: like other ideologies and political projects seeking to exercise power through hegemony, right-­ wing actors not only seek to organize support from workers, but they also must continually make efforts to resolve class tensions within the groups that they are mobilizing. Indeed, today, the growing inequality, expanding populations of informal workers, and surging unemployment that made welfare and poverty alleviation politically relevant for parties across the political spectrum in developing countries like India are now increasingly salient features of the political economy of developed countries, too. Moreover, the politics of redistribution, questions of job security, and growing inequality that have long formed part of the political consensus in developing economies in the Global South are now being resurrected in the political arena of industrialized democracies, as well. While scholars and the media have expressed fascination with the right’s spectacular electoral gains among workers in recent years, there has been almost no attention paid to the sustainability of contemporary right-wing approaches to gaining the support of workers. The Indian case has revealed the importance of a historical perspective in order for us to understand the consolidation of hegemony as a process that is riddled with tensions even as power is becoming increasingly solidified in the hands of the hegemonic bloc. Such tensions highlight ruptures in the unified basis of support constructed by hegemonic actors and can thus erode the basis of power of any hegemonic project, whether it is right-wing or left-wing in nature. An important distinction between the left and the right, however, is in how boundaries that hold together the support bloc are enforced, guarded, or resurrected. Today, a growing number of right-wing movements around the world have been catapulted to state power with the support of workers. Thus, right-wing actors increasingly have at their disposal various modes and tools of state violence as they begin to face the tensions of maintaining hegemony. There is thus an urgent need to better understand the class fissures that signal points of tension and could destabilize right-­ wing power, even from the most unlikely of places.

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References Agarwala, Rina. 2013. Informal Labor, Formal Politics, and Dignified Discontent in India. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. Andersen, Walter K., and Shridhar D. Damle. 1987. The Brotherhood in Saffron: The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Hindu Revivalism. Delhi: Vistaar Publications. Arrighi, Giovanni. 2009. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times. Updated ed. London: Verso. Arrighi, Giovanni, and Beverly J. Silver, eds. 1999. Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System, Nachdr. Contradictions of Modernity 10. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bannerji, Himani. 2002. Inventing Subjects: Studies in Hegemony, Patriarchy and Colonialism. Anthem: Anthem South Asian Studies. London. Basu, Tapan, Pradip Datta, Sumit Sarkar, Tanika Sarkar, and Sambuddha Sen. 1993. Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. Chatterjee, Partha. 2011. Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy, Cultures of History. New York: Columbia University Press. Chidambaram, Soundarya. 2012. The ‘Right’ Kind of Welfare: Seva vs. Patronage in South India’s Urban Slums. Asian Survey 52 (2): 298–320. Corbridge, Stuart, and John Harriss. 2000. Reinventing India: Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism, and Popular Democracy. Cambridge, UK: Malden, MA: Polity; Blackwell Publishers. Curran, J.A. 1951. Militant Hinduism in Indian Politics: A Study of the RSS. New York: Institute of Pacific Relations. Date, Vidyadhar. 2001. Fight Economic Imperialism: BMS. Times of India, May 7. Desai, Manali. 2002. The Relative Autonomy of Party Practices: A Counterfactual Analysis of Left Party Ascendancy in Kerala, India, 1934–1940. American Journal of Sociology 108 (3): 616–657. ———. 2015. Rethinking Hegemony. In New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India, ed. Alf Gunvald Nilsen and Srila Roy. Desai, Manali, and Indrajit Roy. 2016. Development Discourse and Popular Articulations in Urban Gujarat. Critical Asian Studies 48 (1): 1–26. https:// doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2015.1120402. Fernandes, Leela, and Patrick Heller. 2006. Hegemonic Aspirations: New Middle Class Politics and India’s Democracy in Comparative Perspective. Critical Asian Studies 38 (4): 495–522. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 14672710601073028. GOI. 2006. Social, Economic and Educational Status of the Muslim Community of India. New Delhi.

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CHAPTER 5

Traditional Genders, Modern Sexualities: Struggles over Sexual and Gender Nonconformity in Postcolonial India Chaitanya Lakkimsetti

In the past few years, sexual and gender nonconforming subjects in India have made significant legal gains, including the repeal of the colonial-era anti-sodomy law (Section 377) and the legal recognition of transgender identities. These developments are often represented in the mainstream media either as a march forward from regressive traditions to modern progressive sexual values (in the case of Section 377) or as a result of traditional tolerance (in the case of transgender rights). However, both representations are problematic. A simple representation of these developments as progress from tradition to modernity in the context of Section 377

I thank Smitha Radhakrishnan and Gowri Vijayakumar for the valuable and critical feedback they provided on this essay. Special thanks to Myra Marx Ferree and Hae Yeon Choo for their support and critical feedback on this project.

C. Lakkimsetti (*) Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Radhakrishnan, G. Vijayakumar (eds.), Sociology of South Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97030-7_5

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undermines the complex histories of colonialism and nationalism that shaped these regressive legal and social regulations in the first place; assumptions that “traditional” tolerance will automatically lead to acceptance of gender nonconforming subjects as rights-bearing citizens in the case of transgender rights ignores the systematic ways in which gender nonconformity is policed, regulated and made to be abject. The representations of gender rights as “traditional” and sexual rights as “modern” (and hence someone outside the nation, since sexual modernity is seen as foreign) end up not only reproducing binary ways of thinking about tradition and modernity, but they also overlook the concrete ways that social movement actors and legal institutions transform these debates into meaningful patterns of democratic claims. Moreover, despite the overlaps between sexual and gender identity-­ based rights (it has been argued by social movement actors and NGOs that transgender individuals are disproportionately affected by Section 377), the response of the Indian state and Indian nationalist discourses toward these issues vary significantly. There has been consistent opposition to the repeal of Section 377, while there was no opposition to the National Legal Services Authority (NALSA) judgment. The different ways in which state and nationalist groups respond to these issues compel a comparative analysis of the way in which the questions around tradition and modernity are invoked and reworked in these debates. Challenging the binary representation of tradition and modernity, this chapter asks: How do questions of modernity and tradition surface in the legal debates around recognition of sexual and gender nonconforming subjects in India? How do actors (including activist groups, state representatives, and religious and nationalist groups) articulate and rework these debates in the domain of sexuality and law? What does this comparative analysis reveal about the struggles over national belonging of gender and sexual nonconforming subjects in the context of growing Hindu right-wing politics? The Indian legal debates around sexual and gender nonconformity point to the need for context-specific and comparative work that pays attention to how questions around modernity and tradition are reworked and rearticulated in contemporary postcolonial India. Drawing on close reading of legal texts, activist accounts of Section 377 and NALSA, and postcolonial feminist debates around tradition and modernity, this chapter argues that differing groups within the nation-state can construct competing versions of modernity and tradition. These competing visions of modernity and tradition simultaneously reveal the opportunities and

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constraints that gender and sexual nonconforming subjects face in contemporary postcolonial India.

Modernity and Tradition as Discursive Constructs Western-centered theories of sexualities (which often take modernity for granted) cannot explain the shifting political terrain of gender and sexuality in contemporary India. As feminist sociologist Raka Ray has astutely pointed out, postcolonial theory has yet to make its way into the “theoretical arsenal of American sociology” (Ray 2013, 148). This is by and large true for sociology of sexualities as well, where questions regarding the continuing impact of colonialism on sexualities are still marginal to the subfield (Puri 2015). Engaging with postcolonial sexualities would mean not only taking into consideration the central place of sexuality in furthering colonial and imperial power, but it would also attend to the “process, aftermath, and ongoing legacies of Euro-American colonialisms” (Patil and Puri 2020, 62). The ongoing struggles of sexual and gender nonconforming subjects in India offer a fertile ground to examine the complex and shifting debates and contestations around modernity and tradition that reveal the challenges and opportunities presented to gender and sexual nonconforming subjects, as well as the complex entanglement between colonialism, nationalist discourses, and postcolonial politics. Postcolonial theoretical critiques of modernity emphasize that modernity is not something that started in the West and traveled to the rest of the world and that tradition cannot be reduced to some timeless, immutable, and fixed category (Mani 1989; Comaroff and Comaroff 1993; Miller 1994; Gaonkar 1999; Das 2000; Mitchell 2000;  Taylor 2001; Foster 2002; Chakrabarty 2002; Alexander 2005). Instead, these theorists argue that modernity and tradition are contested terrains whose proximity or distance from each other is a matter of ideological and discursive struggle. Drawing on this theoretical tradition (Mani 1989; Alexander 1997; Chatterjee 1989; Das 2000; Menon 2007; Currier 2012), I adopt an approach that understands modernity as contested. The intersection of sexuality and law is a significant site of this contestation, and participants in these debates are active agents who borrow and rework ideas about tradition and modernity into locally meaningful patterns of democratic rights. In particular, Jacqui Alexander (2005) offers a useful way of understanding the tension between modernity and tradition in the context of

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two sites that are particularly relevant for an analysis of contemporary India: neoliberal globalization and the consolidation of laws that reinforce homosexuality as abnormal and deviant. Alexander regards tradition and modernity as constituted through social relations instead of invoking them as fixed temporal categories. She argues, “Tradition and modernity have been used to designate specific temporalities, but they are themselves practices that are constituted through social relations that are interested in their purchase, and thus in that process, move them into ideological proximity to, or distance from, one another” (Alexander 2005, 193). If we stop neatly defining them as a transition from one historical moment to another, or fixed and inert categories, then, Alexander contends, “is it possible to ask how they are made to matter in matters sexual, what are the specific meanings designated to them, and who deploys them and for what end”? (P: 193). Alexander’s framework steers us away from abstract debates about what constitutes modernity (and tradition) and toward a grounded examination of the ways in which social actors deployed, challenged, reworked, and reframed these questions.

Complex Entanglement of Colonial and Nationalist Projects in India Combining both the postcolonial emphasis on imperial power in constituting nations and Michel Foucault’s emphasis on the regulation of sexuality, transnational queer studies (Alexander 1997, 2005; Boellstroff 2005; Lugones 2007; Arondekar 2009; Patil 2013) point to how modernity is constituted through privileging the site of conjugal heterosexuality. These scholars argue that in the process of colonization conjugal heterosexuality was installed as “natural” and “normative.” Thus, within this context, colonial rulers established their racial superiority by constructing the “native” as sexually deviant and lacking the kind of sexual morality that is necessary for “self-rule” (Stoler 1989; Arondekar 2009). As these scholars highlight, sexuality is not peripheral to colonial domination; it is central to constructions of racial superiority and “civilizing” projects that establish colonial domination of the colonized. In the Indian context, for example, the anti-sodomy law (Section 377), Criminal Tribes Act (1871), and anti-­prostitution regulations that were introduced by the colonial state became a means through which the sexual perversity of the native was established in law (Arondekar 2009). While Section 377 outlawed unnatural sex acts against the “order of the nature,” the

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Criminal Tribes Act constructed hijras1 as habitual criminals, creating a class of people who could be subjected to the colonial state’s surveillance and intervention. Postcolonial scholars also show the complicated ways in which colonial and nationalist projects can intertwine and produce complicity in the very subjects that seek to fight against these projects of domination (Chatterjee 1989; Menon 2007; Currier 2012). In nineteenth-century British India, colonial legal reforms in the “private” realm triggered contestations among colonial administrators, social reformers, and nationalist leaders over the degree of colonial intervention that could be allowed into the “private” domain of the colony. Practices such as sati (widow immolation), child marriages, and the devadasi system (a practice where women are married to gods and dedicated to temples) were used by the British colonial state to justify its intervention. The state framed these practices as the result of a lack of modern conceptions of “justice,” “rights,” and “self-­ hood” in the colonies (Mani 1989; Chatterjee 1989; Sangari and Vaid 1989). In response, nationalist discourses established their own moral superiority over the “West” by constructing “home” (the private sphere of the nation) as a space that is uncontaminated by the “material” intervention of the colonial state (Chatterjee 1989). Nonetheless, by adopting binary constructions of public/private, material/spiritual, and Western/ non-Western, nationalist discourses were also shaped by these Western notions of sexuality and gender—the very discourses they tried to resist (Chatterjee 1989). In the context of British colonialism, Indian nationalist discourses advanced a project of self-reform in the mirror image of colonial power. Paradoxically, these discourses asserted their nationalism by both recuperating a “lost” native sexuality and affirming colonial sexual norms of conjugal heterosexuality, which had been used to attempt to “civilize” the natives (Sinha 1995). These nationalist discourses maintained a distinction between India and the West in order to carve out the uniqueness of Indian culture. By upholding Brahmanical patriarchy, they also constructed gendered and sexual practices among marginalized communities (especially Dalits) as the deviant, abject “other” of the nation (Rege 1995). This is 1  Hijras are a socio-religious group of people who dress in women’s clothes and are often organized in clans or gharanas. They are biological males who reject their “masculine” identity to identify as women, “not men,” “in-between man and woman,” or “neither man nor woman.”

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exemplified by the decision to ban women’s erotic literature (especially Dalit and women’s same-sex expressions), as well as a ban on any erotic expression outside of the heterosexual family as exemplified in the debates around the reform of the devadasi system (Nair 1994; Kannabiran 1995; Ramberg 2014). Although sexual regulations and nationalist interventions have been primarily focused on female sexuality and its appropriate site of expression, recent scholarship has also established that colonial and nationalist projects over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used legal and social interventions to discipline a range of non-normative genders and sexualities (John and Nair 1998; Alexander 2005; Lugones 2007; Menon 2007). Menon (2007) argues that when it came to non-normative sexuality and gender expression, there was silence and collusion between the nationalist elite and the colonial state, and nationalist leaders purposely overlooked this continuity between colonial and nationalist constructions. It is unsurprising, then, that nationalist discourses often used the very same colonial legal frameworks to protect Indian culture and tradition from the perceived onslaught of Western sexual contamination. This was strikingly evident in the conversations around Section 377, in which supporters of the law often framed homosexuality as an unwarranted Western influence and the law as a guardian of Indian tradition and culture. The confluence of colonial and nationalist constructions created a univocal reading of India’s multivocal traditions in order to build the modern nation-state (Vanita and Kidwai 2001; Menon 2007). Using literary texts and historical sources to offer evidence of a diverse range of sexual and gender practices in pre-colonial India, postcolonial scholarship on sexuality (Rege 1995; Petievich 2001; Vanita and Kidwai 2001) has argued that the nineteenth century was a crucial period of transition when a minor strand of pre-colonial homophobia became the dominant voice of the postcolonial mainstream (Vanita and Kidwai 2001). Postcolonial scholars not only assert that same-sex sexual desire is not foreign to Indian culture, but through a queer reading of religious and cultural texts they also recover representations of same-sex desire, dating as early as the Fourteenth Century (Bengali epic poems and Perso-Urdu love poems). These scholars also established that the rhetoric of homophobia in modern India is rooted in Judeo-Christian discourses rather than in Indian cultural and religious traditions (Vanita 2002). Through highlighting these multivocal traditions in the past, these scholars decenter modernity as a privileged site of sexual freedom and liberation.

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While the postcolonial Indian state has continued to establish heteropatriarchy as central to national identity, the emergence of Hindu nationalism (especially since the 1990s) has further intensified contestations around sexuality and nation (John and Nair 1998; Bacchetta 1999; Gupta 2009; Varma 2017).2 Hinduism’s construction as a nationalist ideology is expressed in discourses such as Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam or “world as one family” (Varma 2017). These discourses not only establish India as a Hindu nation but also valorize virility, militaristic masculinity (for nationalist leaders), and compulsory heterosexuality at the center of nation building (Bacchetta 1999). Within this context “selfhood and family relationship are subsumed within the larger interests of the kutumb or the family as the central unit of Hindu nation, which is the universal sphere for the Hindu right” (Varma 2017, 68). Expectedly, sexuality and gender become important sites for Hindu nationalist projects to violently and virulently establish this idea of “one family.” This ideological domination is concretely manifested in projects such as Love Jihad—a conspiracy theory accusing Muslim men of luring Hindu women into marriage with the aim of forcefully converting them to Islam—that deem heterosexual romance between Hindu and Muslim couples as a matter of “national” urgency (Gupta 2009). These Hindu nationalist projects also take the form of public vigilantism and policing of young women’s bodies and sexualities. The 2009 attack of women in the southern city of Mangaluru who were targeted for having “loose morals” and for violating “proper” norms of Indian femininity by donning Western clothing and visiting pubs is a case in point. Additionally, the virulently nationalist projects also oppose the reform of sodomy law and target artists’ and filmmakers’ freedom of expression for representations of Indian sexuality and gender that are perceived to be incompatible with Hindu nationalist ideology.3 All of these practices illustrate a renewed attention to the heterosexual family (that adheres to caste and religious norms) as a site of nation building in the context of growing Hindu right-wing nationalism in India. While the increasing popularity of Hindu nationalist agendas is a matter of concern for democratic struggles in India, we cannot assume a priori 2  I use Bacchetta’s definition of Hindu nationalism as an “extremist religious micronationalism of elites,” in which elite leaders of these organizations draw on a homogeneous understanding of Hindu religion as a political strategy to exclude non-Hindus from the nation. For more discussion of Hindu nationalism, see Bacchetta (1999, 141). 3  The attack on the film Fire, directed by Deepa Mehta, in 1996 and the most recent attack on Tamil author Perumal murugan’s book One Part Woman are two cases in point.

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what the impact of these discourses are on the struggles of sexual and gender nonconforming subjects. It is worth noting that while there is opposition to the reform of Section 377 from Hindu nationalist groups, there was no such opposition to the NALSA judgment. The comparative approach I take to analyze the debates around rights and belonging of sexual and gender nonconforming subjects both builds on this scholarship on Hindu nationalism (Bacchetta 1999, 2002; Narrain 2004; Gupta 2009; Varma 2017) and departs from it by complicating a unifying and overpowering narrative of Hindu nationalism. My comparative analysis illuminates the contradictions and fractures within these Hindu nationalist narratives, indicating that nationalist ideologies selectively appropriate gender and sexual identities so long as they remain economically and politically marginalized identities that can represent Indian “progress.” In a globalizing world, Hindu nationalist ideologues selectively traffic in sexual and gender progress to establish their global legitimacy.

Section 377 Struggles and the NALSA Judgment The anti-sodomy law was introduced by the British colonial state in the 1860s under IPC 377 (here by referred to as Section 377). The law prohibits unnatural sex acts that are “against the order of nature” and prescribes a minimum punishment of seven years in prison. When it comes to the formal practice of the law, Section 377 has rarely been used to criminalize consensual sex between adults and is often used in conjunction with rape laws (Puri  2014, 2016). However, since the 1990s, the law has become contentious as HIV/AIDS activists and NGOs started to speak openly about the informal ways in which police use the law to extort, blackmail, and inflict extra juridical violence on sexual minorities. It has also been critiqued for the impediment it posed to HIV/AIDS prevention programs that is that the presence of the law drives gay men and MSM (men who have sex with men) communities underground thus making the task of HIV/AIDS prevention impossible (Lakkimsetti 2016, 2020). Since the mid-1990s 377 has been contested first by NGOs working on HIV/AIDS prevention and then by LGBTQI+ social movements that were galvanized in the process of challenging the law. In 2001, the Naz Foundation (a New Delhi-based group working on HIV/AIDS prevention with gay men) filed a petition in the New Delhi High Court, appealing to the court to decriminalize consensual homosexual acts between adults. After eight years of deliberation, in 2009, the New Delhi High

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Court delivered a judgment in favor of the Naz Foundation. This decision was not only seen as a landmark ruling against the colonial-era law, but the judgment also spoke broadly to minority rights and upheld constitutional morality as a value that would protect the most vulnerable groups in Indian society (Kannabiran 2009).4 The 2009 New Delhi High Court ruling was contested by religious groups (particularly right-wing Hindu groups) in the Indian Supreme Court. These groups argued that the High Court’s decision was an overreach and that the Indian parliament should ultimately have the jurisdiction to reform the law. After four years of deliberation, in a blow to sexual and gender nonconforming people in 2013, the Indian Supreme Court reversed the New Delhi High Court ruling. Even though the 2013 judgment (also referred to as the Koushal judgment) did not explicitly uphold cultural arguments in support of the law, the judges’ remarks that sexual minorities are a “miniscule” group—and hence cannot even constitute a class that could be targeted—further incensed activist groups. The Koushal judgment led to widespread protests not only in India but around the world. Immediately after the ruling, activist groups petitioned the Supreme Court, asking it to review its decision. The Supreme Court sent the matter to a constitutional bench to review the petition. In September 2018, the Supreme Court reversed the Koushal judgment and declared the sodomy law unconstitutional. This was a huge success for gender and sexual nonconforming groups in India who, in the process of opposing the law, built successful social movements that challenged state homophobia as well as social marginalization (Narrain 2004; Narrain and Bhan 2005; Sheikh 2013; Lakkimsetti 2020). In contrast to Section 377, which began as a struggle to challenge a colonial-era criminal law, the 2014 judgment on transgender rights was a result of a civil petition filed in the Supreme Court by the National Legal Services Authority (NALSA) and backed by few transgender and hijra individuals. The positive decision in NALSA came within six months of the Koushal judgment and provided a striking contrast between the Indian judicial approach to transgender rights and homosexual rights. NALSA was hailed as a landmark decision, as it created a charter for constitutional rights for gender nonconforming individuals for the first time in the postcolonial history of the country (Sheikh 2018). 4  Kannabiran, Kalpana. 2009. From “Perversion to Right to Life with Dignity.” The Hindu, July 6. www.thehindu.com.

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The NALSA judgment is crucial not only because it recognizes the gender identity of transgender/hijra groups but also because it balances civil, political, and economic rights. In addition to recognizing the self-­ identification of transgender individuals, the judges also recommended affirmative action in education and employment as a way to correct the historic wrongs against gender nonconforming subjects. In addition, the Court recommended that state and federal governments design policies to increase access to resources (e.g., healthcare or bathrooms) for marginalized groups, as well as integrate services for transgender people with state welfare programs from which they had previously been excluded (such as pensions, access to the public food distribution system, and affordable housing) (Lakkimsetti 2020). While the NALSA judgment was critiqued for falling short on several counts (Dutta 2014; Puri 2016), its major failing was its silence on sexuality rights. Despite a passing reference to the impact of Section 377 on transgender groups and hijras, the judges evaded taking a stand on Section 377. Furthermore, there was no discussion about marriage, conjugal rights, or adoption for transgender individuals in the NALSA judgment. Despite these shortcomings, NALSA opened a space for gender nonconforming groups to rally and mobilize for their rights, and as such its political significance should not be minimized. Soon after the NALSA judgment, several bills meant to protect transgender rights were presented in the Indian parliament. The first bill was introduced by Tiruchi Siva, a parliamentarian from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Despite the fact that Siva’s bill received unanimous approval from the upper house of the Parliament, in 2016 the ruling BJP government drafted its own bill, which undermined several important gains made through NALSA.  Despite a national opposition from transgender groups, the government went ahead and presented the bill in the parliament, and the bill received parliament’s approval in 2019.

Claiming “Traditions of Tolerance”: The Anti-­sodomy Law Debates When the Naz Foundation filed its petition in 2001 (which became the basis for subsequent legal activism), its primary appeal was to public health, arguing that Section 377 prevented sexual minorities from accessing preventive services (which even the Indian state is invested in). While the HIV/AIDS movement and the challenges these legal regulations posed

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for public health provided the opportunity to reform the law, the Naz petition also emphasized that Section 377 was a colonial law and that it had no place in an independent country. The petition states: Influenced by Victorian campaigns for sexual purity, and based upon an essentially anti-pleasure and anti-sex bias, the British sought to rectify Indian marital, familial, and sexual arrangements that they viewed as “primitive.” It is submitted that the introduction of Section 377 in Indian penal law was contrary to then existing Indian traditions, which did not treat sodomy as a crime.5

The colonial state’s reorganization of gender and sexuality in India is foregrounded in this argument, which makes a claim for decolonization of sexuality. The claim here is that the British disregarded Indian sexual values and ethos as primitive and outdated. The petition repeatedly asserted that sodomy or any same-sex desire did not attract any punishment in pre-colonial India as a way to establish that there was no evidence of intolerance toward non-normative sex during this period. The break with this tolerance, the petitioners argued, came with the colonial imposition of the Victorian moral values on the colonies through social and legal regulation. The petition continues to argue “that there had historically existed Indians with homosexual inclinations who were honored and successful members of society” (P: 10). Even while emphasizing that tolerance of sexual nonconformity in India predates colonial rule, the Naz Foundation emphatically argued that criminalization of consensual homosexuality was, in fact, outmoded. The lag in time that the postcolonial state is facing now (i.e., the pressure to catch up with global trends) is only because of the reluctance and indifference of the postcolonial state to let go of this colonial relic. This delay, the petitioners argue, can only be rectified by doing away with colonial laws and outmoded Victorian morality, which do not reflect Indian values. These arguments indicate that differently positioned actors rework notions of linear progress and modernity. Here in the arguments of the Naz Foundation, progress does not mean simply emulating Western patterns of rights but embracing postcolonial arguments to highlight the specificity of Indian modernity and Indian struggles. Thus, the contemporary legal arguments reflect postcolonial thinking as they draw

5

 Naz Foundation vs. Government of New Delhi. WP (C) No. 7455/2001. Para. 40.

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connections between colonial law and contemporary state-sanctioned homophobia. These arguments were made inside courtrooms, but they also resonated outside them, especially when Section 377 was publicly debated on national television. Speaking at a televised debate, Anand Grover—a senior lawyer from the Lawyer’s Collective who represented Naz Foundation in both the New Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court—shared a similar sentiment: “What is the big issue? This is a law that was imposed by the British. Our culture, whether it was Hindu or Muslim…did not tolerate this kind of criminalization of intimate sexual relations. The British imposed it in 1860 they have got rid of it in 1960s, we have carried on this legacy as if we imbibed a colonial mentality. This is colonial mentality.”6 Thus, voices like Grover’s, who seek the reform of Section 377, urge the postcolonial state to be free from remnants of colonization by decriminalizing adult homosexuality and implead the Indian state to recover Indian sexuality from the legal debris of colonialism (Kapur 2005). Pointing to this irony, parliamentarian Shashi Tharoor (a progressive voice in the Congress party) states: Unfortunately, the British came and they criminalized a whole lot of human behavior and human reality that in India was not criminalized. Ironically, the self-appointed defenders of Indian culture are acting as the defenders of the worst prejudices of British Victorian morality. Section 377 and [the] Criminal Tribes Act violate the 2,000 years of Indian cultural practices, India[n] mythology, Indian ethos and Indian history. Instead, we are saddled with colonial era interpretations of what is good for Indians. We are saddled with a morality not from the soil of this country but the soil of Victorian Britain. All the prohibitions the ruling party [BJP] so fondly clings today, all of these are legacies of British colonial rule. And have no roots in Indian practice or Indian ethos.7

These anti-colonial arguments were further amplified when protestors used slogans such as “queer azaadhi” (queer freedom) and “Section 377 Quit India” during a 2009 queer pride march in New Delhi, where Section 377 was often articulated as a major impediment for sexual rights. These 6  “The Homosexual Debate.” NDTV 1 February 2016. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=3GzWnc1Nfko. Retrieved on September 20, 2017. 7  The Qunit, “Tharoor’s Bill to Decriminalize Homosexuality Defeated in LS”. 11 March 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWRkVbdmmEw.

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slogans powerfully invoked Indian anti-colonial struggles. In using these slogans, the protestors sent a message that they were not only countering state-sponsored homophobia, but they were also challenging the colonization of sexuality. These protests and slogans were a stark reminder that even though the country gained independence from colonial rule about 70 years ago, India’s sexual and gender nonconforming subjects not only lack freedoms that heterosexual citizens enjoy—they are still subjected to colonial domination. The arguments about pre-colonial tolerance of homosexuality (often associated with identity categories such as gay and lesbian) project a modern identity onto a historical period where such a concept did not exist (Foucault 1978). Nonetheless, the argument still poses a powerful challenge to state-sponsored homophobia. Thus, a colonial law in a postcolonial context offered a discursive opportunity for activist groups to counter anti-sexuality groups’ claims that homosexuality is Western and hence has no place in Indian culture. By reclaiming pre-colonial traditions and history as tolerant and accepting of gender and sexual diversity, these discourses carve out a space within the nation-state for gender and sexual nonconforming subjects. Emphasizing traditions of tolerance, these voices bridge the gap between tradition and modernity. Here, tradition and modernity are not simply dichotomous but can complement each other. Through fighting the colonial law and arguing for the decolonization of sexuality, activist groups also established the specificity of Indian modernity. In particular, by emphasizing the centrality of tolerance and social justice in Indian democracy, activist groups center constitutional values (a product of anti-­ colonial struggles) and constitutional morality as guiding spirits of the Indian democracy. This sentiment contradicts the majoritarian morality, which selectively upholds colonial values in the name of protecting Indian tradition. Besides legitimizing sexual difference, I also see this as a claim over the meaning of an independent nation whose Constitution reflects the values of those within the boundaries of the nation-state. While the Naz Foundation’s petition has used explicit arguments about Indian cultural past to find legitimacy for sexual nonconforming subjects, the argument around constitutional morality and constitutional values becomes more salient as the legal petition paves way to a social movement to challenge Section 377. In particular, groups such as Voices Against 377 (a New Delhi-based coalition of human rights and LGBTQI+ organizations) consciously strived to broaden debates around legal reform through

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building coalitions with other social movements.8 Evidently, struggles around Section 377—which started as a legal petition in New Delhi— transformed into a social movement as activists galvanized sexual rights groups across the country to fight against the law. These social movements also helped transform the debate from a minority issue (mostly about rights of MSM and gay men) into a conversation that was also about the symbolic role that law plays in establishing heteronormative subjects as “ideal subjects” of the nation. While the Naz petition highlighted the tolerance toward sexual nonconformity in the pre-colonial past, these social movements highlight diversity and difference as important pillars of Indian democracy as well as the accountability of the state to uphold these values. The claim that constitutional morality is central to Indian democracy gained legitimacy when the New Delhi High Court delivered its judgment in 2009. Challenging the anti-sexuality position that Indian society is not ready for homosexuality, in their decision the judges emphatically established that constitutional morality trumps public morality: “If there is any type of ‘morality’ that can pass the test of compelling state interest, it must be ‘constitutional’ morality and not public morality. This aspect of constitutional morality was strongly insisted upon by Dr. Ambedkar in the Constituent Assembly.”9 Thus, the judges unequivocally upheld constitutional morality as a touchstone of Indian democracy. The judges further added that, as a social document, the Indian Constitution is committed to the goal of social justice, as clearly enshrined in Part III (fundamental rights) and Part IV (directive principles). This emphasis on the Indian state’s duty to protect constitutional morality and on the spirit of the constitution’s obligation to protect the most vulnerable minorities was used as a shield to defend against conservative groups and their narrow definition of public morality. By placing diversity and difference at the heart of contemporary Indian democracy, the judiciary also narrowed the gap between tradition and modernity. Even though the 2009 New Delhi High Court decision was challenged, and activists faced a temporary setback when the Supreme Court reversed the New Delhi High Court judgment, the 2009 decision gave a major boost to activist arguments. In New Delhi, during a 8  Whereas the Naz petition was primarily focused on MSM and gay men, Voices against 377 and other groups have also articulated the impact of Section 377 on hijras and lesbian women. 9  Naz Foundation vs. Government of New Delhi. WP (C) No. 7455/2001. Para. 79.

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pride march in 2014, I witnessed firsthand how activist groups used the text from the 2009 judgment as a preamble to their struggles. Ultimately, arguments about constitutional morality won in the courtroom when the Supreme Court finally reversed Section 377 in 2018, arguing that “there is an unbridgeable divide between the moral values on which it [Section 377] is based and the values of the Constitution.”10 By centering the Indian Constitution as a product of anti-colonial struggles, activist groups were able to amplify the idea that respecting diversity and difference are important values of Indian modernity. Making difference and diversity part of Indian modernity was a key strategy to countering the Hindu nationalist claim of Western deviance.

Countering Section 377 Reform Through “Tradition”: The Anti-sexuality Position Ironically, opposition to the repeal of Section 377 also deployed the idea of tradition (as cultural nationalism) to make their case. Opposition to the decriminalization of adult homosexuality does so on the grounds that repealing Section 377 will introduce contaminating Western values that pollute Indian culture and family traditions. This position not only establishes homosexuality as Western, but it also constructs any liberal discourse on sexuality as a threat to the Indian nation. A 2006 petition filed in the New Delhi High Court by B. P. Singhal contended that interpretations of Indian traditions as tolerant of homosexuality were misleading. Singhal not only argued that homosexuality is un-Indian but that there is evidence that punishments were prescribed for same-sex practices in various Hindu religious texts. They [supporters of homosexuality] argue that male sex is also a natural urge. The arguments offered are the sculptures of Kajuraho and Konark and the Kamasutra of Vastsyayan. True, the Hindu quest for knowledge being as profound as it has always been, the ancient seers explored all possible erotic centers in man and woman.11 Based on that knowledge, all kinds of sexual exploits find representation and that includes bestiality also. These 10  Navtej Singh Johar & Ors v. Union of India, Writ Petition (c) No. 7455 of 2001, High Court of Delhi at New Delhi, July 2, 2009. 11  Khajuraho is the largest group of Hindu and Jain temples, which are famous for their erotic sculptures. These temples were supposed to have been built between the tenth and twelfth centuries A.D. Korank (Sun Temple), a thirteenth-century monument and temple in

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have therefore, to be treated as evidence of profound research on the subject of sex and not as a validation of homosexuality or other forms of unnatural sex. There is no evidence to show that the Hindu quest for knowledge about sex ever called the other sexual conducts as “natural.” Were it is so, the ancient Hindu law giver Manu would not have pronounced severe punishment for male as well as female homosexuality.12

In addition to looking for sanction on what is “natural” and Hindu, Singhal also takes on the question of progress and modernity: “The plea for legalizing homosexuality because that is an index of progress and modernism and rejecting the wisdom of the great Sages and Rishis who defined the true purpose of human life and laid down moral codes defining basic human values which could lead to fulfilling that purpose is indeed tragic.”13 Hindu nationalists like Singhal continue to place Indian superiority in the cultural realm—just as their predecessors during the colonial period did— thereby arguing for protecting this realm from Western values and Western ideas of progress. This Indian superiority in the arena of spirituality, Singhal argues, is the realm for freedom from Western materialist domination. Because homosexuality itself is seen as a Western identity, a result of Western influence and contamination, repealing the anti-sodomy law would mean contaminating the nation. Hence, real progress, according to Singhal, cannot be found in imitating the West but in upholding the values spelled out by Hindu scriptures in which the vision for the society and the nation are already written. By predetermining the progress of the Indian nation (which is Hindu) and making marriage and family central to this value system, this strategy constructs homosexuals as the abject “other” of the nation. Singhal emphasized that the uniqueness of Indian culture is in keeping the sacredness of sexuality intact within family and marriage:

one of the Eastern states of India, Orissa depicts erotic and amorous poses that are supposed to be derived from the kamasutra. 12  Manu the Hindu lawmaker was the creator of Manusmriti (Laws of Manu), which is regarded as a foundational work of Hindu law. It was first translated into English in 1794 by Sir William Jone, an English Orientalist and judge on the British Supreme Court. According to some accounts, Manu only prescribed fasting and purification rituals for having homosexual sex and these prescriptions are higher when it comes to heterosexual adultery. Despite these mild punishments, people like Singhal use it as an argument against homosexuality. 13  Petition by B.P. Singhal, New Delhi High Court, 2009. P: 51.

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It is respectfully submitted that in the Western culture, sex is by and large treated as a plaything and women are treated as sexpots for catering to the lust of men. A whole mountain of pornographic literature, videotapes, DVDs have been created. Various kinds of vibrators and gadgets have flooded the Western markets to heighten the sexual experience. Various kinds of perverted sex practices are being experimented [with]…The sanctity of “family” is coming under increased duress.14

The dichotomy of Western promiscuity and Eastern (Indian) purity is constructed to legitimize claims that homosexuality is a Western contamination, and Indian tradition is represented as the only means by which the Indian nation can be protected from such contamination. Here, Westernization is read as analogous with transgressive and excessive sexualities, whereas being Indian is read as analogous with respect to familial relationships and heteropatriarchy. Such rhetoric is also resonated in the arguments presented by Baba Ramdev (a famous yoga guru) in the petition he presented to the Supreme Court along with other religious leaders who contested the validity of the 2009 New Delhi High Court judgment. Ramdev’s petition states: In the present case, the petitioner is agitating the right of homosexuals against the interest of society at large, but it failed to appreciate that before claiming right of equality, privacy, freedom of expression etc., there is correlative duty, which imposes upon all the citizen duties like to maintain law and order, public morality, promote harmony, to respect our rich and composite culture towards the excellence in all spheres.15

This emphasis on duty resonates with the Hindu nationalist valorization of self-sacrifice and duty to the nation as a central attribute of citizenship (Gupta 2009; Varma 2017). While the petition does not spell out what the rich and composite culture of India is exactly, it is not a stretch to say that, according to Hindu nationalists like Ramdev, it is respect to the hetero-­patriarchal family that constitutes this rich culture. It is not upholding constitutional values but upholding public morality—defined by the Hindu nationalists—that becomes the duty of the citizens. For Hindu nationalists, the antidote to Western cultural influence is to return to ancient Hindu traditions such as yoga and scripture, which can be used to  Petition by B.P. Singhal, New Delhi High Court, 2009. P: 53.  Petition by Baba Ramdev, Supreme Court of India, July 2009.

14 15

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counter such an onslaught. Baba Ramdev (in)famously announced on national television that homosexuality is a disease for which he has a “guaranteed cure.” Hindu nationalists wittingly or unwittingly upheld colonial ideals by rhetorically positioning homosexuality as Western and distancing it from Indian cultural values (which are articulated as traditional), thus continuing to perpetuate the binary opposition between Western/Indian. Yet, this strategy did not help them to win their argument. By 2016, some of the religious opposition to Section 377 seemed to have fizzled out. In the end, the arguments around constitutional morality had more legitimacy over narrowly defined ideas of public morality. More nuanced arguments with a distinction between decriminalization and legalization began to surface in the public domain. In 2016, in a national debate organized by a national television channel NDTV, the host pondered why a legal battle was happening in the courts when religious groups were no longer interested in a fight to retain Section 377.16 Arguments about Section 377 upholding Indian culture from the onslaught of “homosexual contamination” fizzled out at this point of the debate (at least some religious leaders stopped arguing openly for criminalization). The Additional Solicitor General, Tushar Mehta, representing the federal government in the Supreme Court, submitted that the government would support the court’s decision if it confined that decision to Section 377. Mehta stated that as far as the constitutional validity of Section 377 was concerned (insofar as it applied to “consensual acts of adults in private”), the federal government would leave the question to the wisdom of the court. He also urged the court to not to widen the scope of the hearing to issues like gay marriages, adoption, and inheritance.17 In addition, prominent BJP leaders such as Shania NC (a national spokesperson for the BJP) also openly articulated this position on national television. Despite the fact that nationalist discourses articulated binary oppositions between Western sexuality and Indian familial ideals, in the end these oppositions could not hold up against arguments in favor of constitutional rights and constitutional morality. This was a huge win for activist groups who not only advanced 16  “Scrap Section 377: Should Parliament Lead the Way?” NDTV, February 6, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaWDLKY9ZH4. 17  “‘We don’t want 2 gay men holding hands waling on Marine Drive to be arrested,’ says SC on Section 377,” The Times of India. July 11, 2018. https://timesofindia.indiatimes. com/india/article-377-an-example-of-social-disdain-declaring-it-invalid-will-help-lgbtcommunity-sc/articleshow/64949972.cms.

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ideas of constitutional morality in the course of fighting against the law, but they also established the ground for claims over rights and belonging for queer subjects in Indian modernity on the basis of traditions of tolerance. Ultimately, constitutional morality (as a guiding spirit of Indian modernity) won over arguments about public morality, as activists brought conversations happening in the courtroom out onto the streets. In fact, when the Naz Foundation first filed its petition, only a handful of groups were working for the rights of sexual and gender nonconforming people. However, in the last 17 years of legal struggle, this number has increased many-fold; today there are queer pride marches organized even in smaller cities. Another plausible explanation for why constitutional morality won out could be that Hindu nationalists never even considered Section 377 as a worthy fight in the first place. As mentioned earlier, opposition to Section 377 from an explicitly Hindu nationalist perspective did not emerge until 2006. It was only after 2009, when the New Delhi High Court’s decision made the law more visible nationally and internationally, that religious groups galvanized their efforts together to fight the reform of the law. The shift in BJP’s position on homosexuality might be indicative of the fact that, within a globalizing context, Hindu right-wing politics also need to adjust its tone and tenor. In addition, India’s image as an emerging economy and as a global leader needed to be carefully balanced with the nationalist ideals of the Hindu right-wing groups. This does not mean that Hindu nationalists do not perceive homosexuality as a threat to the nation. On the contrary, by refusing to recognize marriage and other civil rights they continue to uphold heteropatriarchy as the norm.

Complicating “Traditional Tolerance”: The Transgender Rights Debate In the debate around Section 377 reform, sexual minority groups have had to painstakingly establish that homosexuality and homosexual tendencies have Indian roots. However, this was not the case when it came to NALSA and the rights of gender nonconforming subjects. Moreover, the presence of gender nonconforming subjects, such as hijras, is seen as proof that there is tolerance toward gender non-normativity in India. In contrast to the narrative of denial and distancing sexual nonconformity as a Western practice, when it came to gender nonconforming subjects there was a

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narrative of recovery and appropriation. This narrative of recovery tried to uplift gender nonconforming subjects from the burden of colonialism, arguing that their position in Indian society declined with colonial rule and with the introduction of the Criminal Tribes Act by the British colonial state. While this narrative offers legitimacy to hijras/transgender subjects in the realm of law and policy, their recognition as “native” subjects does not necessarily guarantee rights. On the contrary, in the guise of offering rights, the Indian state reinstates transphobic policy that undermines the rights of gender nonconforming subjects. In this section, I show how gender nonconforming subjects have to fight not against denial of their right to exist in the nation but rather the appropriation of “traditional tolerance” of gender nonconformity in the service of the nation. Moreover, in contrast to the debate around Section 377, in which religious groups opposed the legal recognition of homosexuality, there was no opposition to the NALSA judgment when it came to the recognition of gender non-normative subjects. Responding to a petition filed by the NALSA, the Apex Court recognized gender identity as a constitutional right for the first time in the history of the postcolonial nation. In addition, it also recommended that the Indian state provide affirmative action for transgender individuals in education and employment. The NALSA judgment devotes an entire section to the historical background of gender nonconformity in India. In it, the Justices cite from various Hindu religious texts, such as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, as proof that gender variation was accepted in pre-colonial India and that it is part of the Indian cultural ethos: TG [Transgender] community comprises of Hijra, eunuchs, Kothi, Aravanis, Jogappas, Shiv-Shakthis etc. and they, as a group, have got a strong historical presence in our country in the Hindu mythology and other religious texts…. Lord Rama, in the epic Ramayana, was leaving for the forest upon being banished from the kingdom for 14 years, turns around to his followers and asks all the “men and women” to return to the city. Among his followers, the hijras alone did not feel bound by this direction and decided to stay with him. Impressed with their devotion, Rama sanctions them the power to confer blessing on people on auspicious occasions.18

18  National Legal Services Authority v. Union of India and others, Writ Petition No 400 of 2012. Supreme Court of India. P: 10.

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The Justices list various examples from Hindu mythology (and occasionally from Jain texts) to establish the strong historical presence of the community in Indian cultural history. This discursive strategy positions hijras as part of Hindu tradition even though there is evidence that hijra life worlds in India are very much rooted in Islam as well as syncretic practices that emerged from marginalized spaces they inhabit (Reddy 2006). Despite the fact that the terms hijra and aravani are not the same as transgender (these terms have more spiritual and historical origin in contrast to “transgender,” which is a modern term) there is an ease with which these regional/national categories are subsumed into the global umbrella term “transgender.” The NALSA judgment not only highlighted the historical acceptance of gender variant individuals but also ideas such as trituya prakriti (third nature) as a way to suggest that psychological approaches to gender variance were also prevalent in pre-colonial India. It is important to note that it is courts themselves that are doing this discursive work for activist groups. In particular, they make a reference to Jain texts where there is a mention of “psychological sex,” as a way to establish the legitimacy that the “third gender” category had in the Indian past. The claim here is that there is not only acceptance of gender variance but that gender variance itself played an important cultural and historical role in pre-­ colonial India. For instance, the NALSA judgment states the following: The place that gender nonconforming groups had in Indian cultural tradition, the Court argues, was disrupted by the British rule in India and specifically with the introduction of the Criminal Tribes Act (1871): We notice that even though historically, Hijra/transgender persons had played a prominent role, with the onset of colonial rule from the 18th century onwards, the situation has changed drastically. During the British rule, a legislation was enacted to supervise the deeds of Hijras/TG community, called the Criminal Tribes Act, 1871, which deemed the entire community of hijras persons as innately ‘criminal’ and addicted to the systemic commission of non-bailable offences.19

19  The Act provided for the registration, surveillance, and control of certain criminal tribes and eunuchs, and it penalized eunuchs, who were registered and appeared to be dressed or ornamented like a woman in a public street or place, as well as those who danced or played music in a public place. They could also be arrested without warrant and sentenced to imprisonment up to two years or fine or both. Under the Act, the local government had to register the names and residence of all eunuchs residing in that area, as well as of their properties, who were reasonably suspected of kidnapping or castrating children or of committing

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Thus, the introduction of the Criminal Tribes Act in 1871 is seen as a decisive marker for the decline of hijra and transgender status in India. The Apex Court acknowledges that colonial legal regulations have shaped the broader socio-cultural understanding of hijras and transgender people and that this has led to the community’s extreme marginalization. The end of the “golden period” for hijras, intersex, and transgender people came with the imposition of colonial values on Indian culture and traditions. While the NALSA judgment passingly acknowledges that Section 377, which was introduced a decade before the Criminal Tribes Act, established gender variant subjects as habitual sodomites, there was no emphasis on how Section 377 impacted gender variant groups in contemporary postcolonial India. In fact, gender nonconforming groups in India have painstakingly argued that not only did Section 377 target homosexual subjects, but in its application the law unevenly impacted hijras and other gender variant subjects whose class status and hypervisibility in public spaces make them easy targets for police violence and harassment. Such a glorified view of the pre-colonial acceptance of gender variance also makes its way into other official narratives, particularly during debates in the parliament on transgender rights. One parliamentarian expressed the following during a debate in the Parliament in 2015: [T]here was place for hijras in Indian past and tradition. But after British came I think in 1871 they passed the Criminal Tribes Act, where they categorized hijras as innately criminal, addicted to systemic commission of nonbailable act. The British made them criminal tribes and they never gave them any right and recognition. And after independence we have forgotten them. Now we come across these people every time in trains but the Indian society treats them as if they don’t belong here.20

Even though this parliamentarian acknowledges that there is discrimination against gender nonconforming subjects in post-independence India, by framing it as a national amnesia rather than a result of systemic discrimination and inequality they blunt their criticism of the Indian state. Even though the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act was struck from the books, local offenses under Section 377 of the IPC. National Legal Services Authority v. Union of India and others, Writ Petition No 400 of 2012. Supreme Court of India. P: 16. 20  “Comments of members in the discussion of the Rights of Transgender Persons Bill,” Rajya Sabha TV, 13 March 2014. YouTube Video, 14:27. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=cIeC9c7LNmk.

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police codes and state laws often carry these colonial-era regulations.21 Moreover, colonial laws (such as vagrancy and beggary laws, which have not been abolished) directly impact gender nonconforming people when police and local law enforcement authorities deploy these laws to harass, extort, and inflict extreme forms of violence on them. Such representations conflate tolerance with acceptance, at best, and at worst they serve to amplify (Hindu) nationalist discourses by glorifying the Indian nation and culture as tolerant and “forward” in its thinking. As political theorist Wendy Brown points out, tolerance as a political strategy can often be used as a supplement for formal equality, and it remains as an impediment for demands for substantive freedom and equality (Brown 2009). This is especially evident in the words of BJP parliamentarian Nishikant Dubey: Indian tradition has always regarded and respected transgender rights. When we talk about Indian tradition, we talk about Narasimha avatar, don’t we?22 We pray for Ganesh! If you think of Ganesh, Ganesh is half human and half animal.23 We were very forward. If we talk about our culture, talk about Narasimha avatar, think of the atmosphere at that time? My point is that Indian culture and tradition has always accepted transgender people and even extreme transgender that is the hybrid of animal and human…we even worship them. It was the British that attacked them by attacking our culture and civilization by framing laws (emphasis added).24

While the Narasimha and Ganesh avatars have nothing to do with gender variance, in bringing up these mythological figures this ruling party member equates gender nonconforming groups with phantasmatic beings. Moreover, the claim that “we were very forward” helps Hindu nationalist 21  Two examples of this continuation of the colonial criminalization of gender nonconformity are the Karnataka Police Act and the Hyderabad Police Act. Section 36 (A) of the Karnataka Police Act (1963) gives power to police officials to register names and places of “eunuchs” residing in their jurisdiction. 22  Narasimha is the fourth avatar of Vishnu. In this avatar, he manifests as half man and half lion. According to Hindu mythology, he took on this avatar to kill the demon Hiranayakashipu who could not be killed by God or a human, as he got a boon from Brahma the Creator. Narasimha’s avatar as half lion and half human gives him the opportunity to kill the demon. 23  Ganesh, the Hindu God of auspiciousness, is half human and half elephant. He has an elephant trunk and a human body, which, according to mythology, was given to him by his father Siva. 24  “Nishikant Dubey’s speech on Transgender Rights”. Mango News, 29 April 2016. YouTube Video, 9:13. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBJI-FuX4dY.

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ideologues to construct Hinduism as a superior religious practice. By glorifying Hindu culture and making British colonists responsible for the degraded social and cultural status of gender nonconforming individuals, articulations such as this mask the postcolonial Indian state’s role in perpetuating and carrying forward colonial gender ideologies. What is asserted in argument such as this is that it is British colonial rule that caused the wedge between Indian tradition and modern aspirations of transgender individuals; otherwise, the Indian nation is perfectly capable of recognizing and respecting transgender rights. Gender nonconforming individuals become the foil through which Hindu nationalist groups simultaneously affirm traditional superiority over the West (and the rest of the world) and also establish India as a modern nation-state capable of recognizing gender diversity and difference. This indicates that the ideological distance between modernity and tradition can be bridged when it serves Hindu nationalist goals. Criticizing the official construction of a “golden period” for gender nonconforming subjects in India, Gee Imam, a transgender activist, makes these succinct remarks: But clearly, the Ministry believes that the golden period of trans/intersex people in the subcontinent was destroyed by the British, instead of our collective disempowerment being the result of various factors like caste, patriarchy, state apathy, transphobia, lack of awareness, public prejudices etc. in addition to the criminalizing laws of the colonial empire and the nation state. In a couple of days, the Indian state will celebrate 71 years of independence, but still not take responsibility for the condition of its own citizens.25

While acknowledging the histories of colonization, Imam’s critique emphasizes that the postcolonial state is responsible for the stigma and transphobic policies that continue to marginalize gender nonconforming individuals. The instrumental approach adopted by the state toward transgender/hijra rights is evident in the common conflation of transgender and intersex people in these debates. It carries the ill-informed notion that trans individuals are born with ambiguous genitals and, as a result, are created in nature differently. This conflation functions to establish gender nonconforming individuals as asexual and innocent (in addition to not 25  First as Apathy, Then as Farce: The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, 2016. http://orinam.net/apathy-farce-trans-rights-bill-standing-committee-report/.

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paying attention to intersex issues) and hence as needing of protection. This is in contrast to sexual nonconformity, which is perceived as deliberate, “dangerous,” and “deviant.” Despite the fact that NALSA judgment and the accompanied politics around it expands categories of gender beyond the binary of male and female, this is not seen as a threat to the existing gender order or national image, as it is the dominant-caste Hindu men who are still the official and legitimate representatives of the nation. This ostensible “traditional tolerance” is deployed instrumentally to cast the Indian nation-state in a modern and progressive light globally, as well as to feed into Hindu nationalist ideology. The state’s hypocrisy was further highlighted when the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment drafted a Transgender Persons Protection Bill in 2016. The bill came under heavy scrutiny from transgender groups for watering down many of the important provisions in NALSA. They even argued that the bill would enshrine transphobia as the law of the land. In particular, the government’s new bill does not recognize the right to self-identity that was granted by NALSA and instead prescribes that transgender individuals go through a bureaucratic process to establish their gender identity. Furthermore, the bill does not make any mention of affirmative action in education and employment, a crucial right gained through NALSA. In addition, the bill introduced new clauses that could potentially recriminalize the community, including increased penalties for begging, which is the primary livelihood for hijras. Transgender activists also critiqued the fact that the lesser punishment for crimes (a maximum of two years for egregious assault) against transgender individuals in the bill reiterates and strengthens the idea that trans lives are dispensable and of lesser value.26 Despite the fact that transgender groups across the country weighed in and presented their objections to the bill, the government went ahead and presented the bill and retained some of these problematic provisions. Despite the protest of transgender and hijra groups, the bill was passed in the Parliament on November 26, 2019, and became an Act with the approval of the President of India. Gender variance is acceptable, as long as it has the state’s seal of approval. Practices that fall outside of the state’s approval—such as continued reliance on alms-seeking and blessing for livelihood, kinship practices that decenter heteropatriarchy—continue to be perceived as deviant and as a threat to the nation. This runs parallel to 26   Tamil Nadu Protests Trans Bill 2019. 2019. http://orinam.net/tn-proteststransbill-2019/.

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the developments in the debates around Section 377, where Hindu nationalist groups ultimately gave up their fight to uphold the law, and trans inclusion as part of glorious Hindu tradition ultimately failed to address the demands of trans activists. Today, transgender activists are still fighting this regressive bill.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have demonstrated how modernity and tradition are co-­ constituted in the debates around the recognition of sexual and gender nonconforming subjects in postcolonial India, challenging a teleological understanding of progress with regard to sexual and gender orientation. I have shown how modernity and tradition are not just temporal concepts but are also shifting ideological and social relationships. Understanding modernity and tradition as shifting ideological and social relationships, then, helps us appreciate claims and counterclaims as emerging from the contested sites of law and social struggle, as well as nationalist anxieties around cultural identity. The comparative analysis of these two sites reveals that differing groups within the nation-state can construct competing versions of modernity and tradition. It shows that modernity and tradition are rarely constructed as dichotomous in even the most conservative approach. Within the Hindu nationalist discourse, the figure of the hijra (and other gender variant categories such as kinnar, aravan, and jogappa) is seen as a bridge between past and present—and, as a result, is afforded legitimacy as a national subject. However, a similar legitimacy was not afforded to homosexual subjects despite evidence presented by activist groups about the colonial disruption of sexual variance. Thus, accepting gender identity rights is not seen as a Western imitation; it is seen as a correction of historical wrongs committed by the colonial state by returning selective recognition to hijras/transgender individuals who had it in the past. In contrast, despite evidence that there was permissiveness toward sexual variance in pre-­ colonial India, this evidence has been dismissed as a misreading of the scriptures and religious texts. Recognition of sexual non-normativity, in these iterations, is a mere imitation of the West, and Hindu nationalists argue that, by and large, there is opposition to homosexuality in the Indian society. What is established in these debates is an opposition to non-­ normative sex and tolerance toward gender nonconformity. Gender becomes non-transgressive, and sexuality becomes dangerous in these

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iterations. By closing the gap between tradition and modernity—folding a traditional subject position such as hijra into the umbrella of transgender, which is a modern identity—nationalist discourses on gender nonconformity not only appropriate rights discourses, they also selectively invoke modernity as a way of appeasing global civil society. India’s progressive outlook toward transgender rights enhances its image globally as a liberal and modern democracy. By comparing these two sites where the legal rights of LGBTQI+ communities are debated, I showed that Hindu nationalist discourse is not always uniform in its treatment of gender and sexual nonconforming subjects and neither are they always successful in achieving their agenda. I argued that, that within the Hindu nationalist discourses, non-­normative sexuality figures as transgressive, while recognition of gender non­ conformity is seen as a move toward “progress.” Within this discourse, non-­normative sexuality undermines heteropatriarchy and gender nonconformity remains non-threatening (as long as it remains an economically and politically marginalized identity) and an indicator of “progress” for the rest of the world. Despite the fact that Hindu right-wing groups have put up a staunch opposition to the reform of Section 377, in the end their arguments about public morality and the protection of Indian family values were defeated (at least in the courts) by powerful arguments about constitutional morality. In the process of fighting against colonial-era law, sexual and gender nonconforming subjects have not only carved out a space within the nation but also rearticulated the core value of Indian modernity as respect for diversity and difference. They have also shown that they could successfully fight against narrowly defined ideas of history and tradition by re-­ centering constitutional values and ideas of constitutional morality. Yet, this emphasis on constitutional values is not unique to sexuality and gender-­ based struggles. The recent struggle around Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in India is an important case in point where activists used the preamble of the Indian Constitution to protect Indian secularism from being attacked by Hindu nationalist agendas. Indeed, constitutional morality and constitutional values appear to be a crucial component in reimagining the nation during a time of Hindu nationalism wherein minoritized groups are still making some important gains.

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PART II

Diasporic Mediations

CHAPTER 6

Veiled Sociology: The Epistemologies of Purdah and Two-Boat Ethnography Fauzia Husain

There’s a saying in Pakistan that “you can’t ride two boats at the same time.” Yet, that is precisely what I was forced to do when, as an ethnographer, I attempted to tether western academe to the Pakistani world of purdah through my fieldwork. Purdah, literally “curtain,” usually refers to practices of gendered seclusion, such as the isolation of women in the zenana (a kind of harem, see Hanna Papanek 1973). But in my work, I update the term to capture contemporary Pakistani women’s efforts to claim privacy and dignity as they take on new roles in the public arena (see Husain 2020). In the course of my doctoral field research, I observed working-class1 women agents of state security use various purdah 1  Scholars typically use college education as a proxy for middle-class status. However, such an operationalization is complicated in Pakistan, where questions of status complicate the meaning of class. I define these women as working class in order to distinguish them from the working poor (janitorial staff, unskilled labor) and from the relatively affluent middle class who study at English medium private schools or women who are employed in the officer cadre that requires passing civil service examinations. A handful of my participants pos-

F. Husain (*) Institute for Gender and the Economy, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Radhakrishnan, G. Vijayakumar (eds.), Sociology of South Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97030-7_6

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modalities or techniques to recuperate some of the privacy they felt they lost due to the public nature of their work. But in order to report on their fidelity to such practices, I had to confront a two-boat dilemma—an impasse generated because of my simultaneous membership within two distinct communities: the Pakistani one where I was raised and that was hosting my research and the western academy that trained me and supported my credentials. To yoke these worlds together through my fieldwork, I had to find a way to negotiate the clash between purdah logics, which prize privacy, and the logics of ethnography, which involves revelation. Though it raised various ethical, methodological, and conceptual issues, I eventually came to see purdah as a useful resource for navigating the disjunctures that a two-boat ethnography can produce. For just as purdah is a modality of mobility, a set of techniques that allow women to enter public arenas in relatively non-disruptive ways, it can also serve to facilitate mobility for the two-boat ethnographer by allowing her to enter local communities in relatively non-disruptive ways. Like purdah, two-boat ethnography requires flexibility. Just as purdah sometimes involves full body veils and sometimes slighter adjustments like lowering the gaze, two-boat ethnography requires various large and small accommodations that permit the ethnographer to maintain dual membership in the academy as well as the communities under investigation. Like the various modalities of purdah, these small adjustments can be painful and dangerous, and at times are borne by the researcher’s body, which absorbs the brunt of irreconcilable memberships like the tension wire on a bridge. And finally, like purdah, the modalities of a two-boat ethnography can also entail an acquiescence to interdependence. Just like veiling is often a collective and collaborative practice that requires a dependence on others, two-boat ethnography also obliges us to surrender some of our autonomy. We must rely on others not only to protect and support us in the course of fieldwork but also to join with us as readers in transcending long-standing stereotypes and assumptions about unfamiliar others.

sessed two-year college degrees, even though their jobs did not require such qualifications, though most had only completed high school (a degree locally referred to as Intermediate). Moreover, these women lived primarily in neighborhoods (like Lyari) that are considered low income or working class, and had parents, siblings, and spouses working jobs that are seen as working class, such as taxi driver, mechanic, or clerk.

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In what follows, I describe three modes of purdah that I assumed— interdependence, privation, and self-defense—in order to successfully complete my two-boat fieldwork. I did not always succeed in adopting purdah techniques, however, and I recount some of my failures as well. Both the successes and the failures transformed my understanding of Pakistani notions of purdah and privacy, and both also complicated my feelings and my conclusions about two-boat ethnography. This chapter draws on fieldwork I conducted in Karachi with Policewomen, Lady Health Workers (LHWs) and “airhostesses”—frontline workers employed by the Pakistan state to discipline, surveil, interrogate, and address women subjects of state security. Frontline women enable women subjects to maintain purdah in their interactions with the state, but in doing so they cross some of the very gendered borders they uphold through their service. To understand how these agents of state security manage this boundary crossing, I had to engage in some complicated boundary work of my own. There is no such thing as purdah. In the academy, the two-boat dilemma first manifested itself as a conceptual issue. Anonymous reviewers, conference interlocutors, and even development experts I met in the course of my investigations evinced anger and resistance against my use of the word purdah. There is no such thing as purdah, they told me, certainly not in Karachi. It is an outdated term, they insisted, one that reflects western orientalism and robs women of their agency. These pronouncements were initially astounding to me. Having grown up in Karachi, I had been used to hearing people use the term quite broadly to describe various forms of shelter from an unwelcome male gaze. It was with a similar broad usage that the word came up in my discussions with research participants. In fact, purdah wasn’t just something I heard other people say, it was something that I was importuned by friends, former colleagues, family members and research participants to do in various ways that complicated my fieldwork. I had to incorporate various modalities of purdah in my fieldwork because as a Pakistani woman, I had to satisfy my family that I was taking steps to ensure my safety. And also because the absence of such signals would have alienated my interlocutors, suggesting to them that I was either too westernized or too vulgar to be deserving of their time and confidence. Since I was raised in Pakistan, I also felt personally compelled to adopt various gestures of modesty, as I have done for most of my life, as a form of armor that makes me feel less conspicuous and therefore safer in public spaces in Pakistan. In short, while doing ethnographic work in Karachi’s working-class milieus, I had to employ various purdah

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modalities while simultaneously hearing from feminist scholars and aid specialists located in the U.S. that there was no longer such a thing as purdah in this part of the world. The anger and disbelief my interlocutors evinced for purdah was, I believe, largely tied to politics in the West. As one western feminist patiently explained to me at a conference held in North America, by discussing veiling practices as disadvantageous to women in Pakistan, I was providing fodder for Islamophobic discourses that seek to outlaw veiling in western contexts, specifically through claims that veiling represents a form of oppression, not agency. Thus, my decision to write about the costs of purdah could be seen, I was told, as a betrayal of feminist causes and concerns. While their worries were understandable, succumbing to the reservations of western feminists would require me to ignore the concerns and perspectives of local scholars. For while my western interlocutors denied the existence of purdah, instead encouraging me to represent veiling as agentic and emancipatory, local scholars not only embraced the term but represented it in a much more nuanced way: as both a resource and a restraint. In their work, purdah appears not just as a form of agency but also as a kind of structure, a set of gendered cultural imperatives that can serve also as a toolkit for women to draw on in different ways (see Mirza 2002; Masood 2019; Haque 2020). But this more nuanced treatment of purdah is muted when reviewers and other gatekeepers work to redirect scholarship, like mine, which uncovers not only the liberatory but the repressive, costly, and painful aspects of purdah’s various modalities. Although this redirection is done in the name of lofty concerns like cultural relativism or on the noble pretext of recuperating Muslim agency, it also ironically winds up erasing the perspectives of Pakistani scholars, like Farhat Taj, who in her doctoral thesis refers to the gendered patterning of social relations in the Peshawar police as a “purdah gothic” (Taj 2004).  Similarly, sociologist Riffat Haque, argues in a Pakistani journal that “purdah” in both its “visible and invisible forms,” creates “an interconnected web of deprivation, marginalization and denial, not only of women’s rights for self-improvement, but also of their roles as agents of change” (2020, 304). In short, to write about my case, I had to find a way to straddle both western feminist concerns, as well as the concerns and perspectives of Pakistani women—scholars as well as research participants. This task was all the more complicated because of the broader connection of purdah with notions of privacy.

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Unveiling is betraying. To the extent that purdah, literally curtain, is understood as a form of privacy in Pakistan, ethnography, a set of practices aimed at unveiling the hidden dynamics of social life, can feel to the ethnographer like an enterprise in systematic and serial violations. One such violation is the betrayal of nation. Since the social situation of brown women has long helped justify the subjugation of brown people by western imperial powers, any revelation of gendered abuse or hardship not only provokes long-running Pakistani anxieties and insecurities about western domination, but when authored by a brown woman such disclosures are experienced as a treacherous betrayal (see Narayan 1998; Visweswaran 1994). Thus, Pakistani social media accounts are replete with examples of women, like Malala Yusufzai and Sharmeen Obaid, who are demonized for supposedly selling Pakistan’s dirty laundry to the West in exchange for money, visas, and international awards. Critics say that this recompense is granted by a biased West only to those who author one-­ sided and negative representations of the country, which help further the West’s aim of exploiting Pakistan in pursuit of global domination (see Kugelman 2017). While we may not buy into the conspiracy theories that fuel such accusations, as scholars we are only too aware of the long-standing tropes and stereotypes our work may unwittingly reinvigorate. Postcolonial contexts, such as Pakistan, have long been cast in a negative light by imperializing discourses, which use gender injustice as a justification for the ongoing conquest and control of these regions (e.g., see Abu-Lughod 2002). Investigating purdah, therefore, makes the already treacherous practice of ethnography into a doubly fraught enterprise. Such an inquiry takes the sociological gaze into arenas accessible only to a few, relatively unique individuals, those who are practiced in the modalities of purdah and also trained in western modalities of representation. Such individuals don’t just invade the privacy of purdah sheltered lives; they subject these lives to the scrutiny of potentially hostile audiences, some of whom might use the data presented to further various oppressive political projects. Purdah and racialized sex objects. But it was not only my membership in the Pakistani nation that was complicated through my attempt to marry ethnography with purdah. Critics in Pakistan may assume that any unflattering portrait of the country is unquestioningly embraced and rewarded by western audiences, but in mainstream sociological circles, an investigation into the lives of veiled brown women may be seen as either too exotic for serious consideration. Worse, when undertaken by a brown

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woman, such an inquiry may be seen as a form of “me-search” that is of little relevance to the broader discipline. Kimberly Hoang (2015) points out the gendered dynamics of such theoretical discounting. When it comes to field work, she notes, ethnographers of color and women ethnographers come under greater scrutiny than those who are white and male. Men who study exotic settings are cast as “heroic researchers,” she argues, while women are transformed into “sexualized objects.” These trends create additional hurdles and anxieties for Black and brown women ethnographers, who are forced to think about the ways that racial and sexual stereotypes undermine their credentials and the perceived quality of their work. For me, knowledge about these racializing processes produced heightened anxieties around questions of method and procedure. My adoption of various purdah modalities in the course of ethnographic work, I feared, might produce questions about the scientific rigor and quality of my data. By doing purdah in the course of my ethnography, I worried that I was betraying my training and therefore undermining my membership to the discipline of sociology.

Modality 1: Interdependence When I first entered the field site, my mother came with me. I agreed to this embarrassing sign of dependence in order to assuage her anxieties rather than mine. She wanted to see the lay of the land and scope out potential threats to my safety for herself. She also worried that without her presence, I would be seen as a particular kind of woman: someone who is looking for adventure and therefore deserving of attack. I could have rebelled against this solicitude but doing so would be unnecessarily disrespectful and not an especially auspicious way to begin a long project. In any case, I was hardly the first ethnographer to be accompanied by a parent into the field. Lila Abu-Lughod describes receiving similar aid from her father when she began her field work in Egypt (1986). In that context too, the ethnographer’s parent accompanied her at the start of the ethnographic endeavor in order to ensure she was seen as a respectable woman, a daughter with a family that cared for her, wished to protect her, and was supportive of her educational pursuits. My mother and I first entered the ethnographic field site in Peshawar, in the north of Pakistan, where I had initially planned to conduct the entirety of my project with women undergoing Commando training at the

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police academy.2 We both wrapped ourselves in large chadors and went to the police academy to meet the principal, a retired army commando. We began by making polite small talk over tea. At first, he seemed wary and distant, speaking very formally and making only the politest small talk. But the ice was quickly broken, thanks to my mother. The principal remarked that looking at her, he was reminded of his close friend and former army comrade, who I will call Arif. Arif was in fact related to us; he was married to my mother’s cousin. It was odd that the principal should figure out this connection. Arif, after all, was only connected to my mother via marriage. Nevertheless, the common acquaintance provided a kind of in, speeding up trust and rapport. Something similar happened in the Karachi police context. Here, my mother again went with me to my first meeting with the principal at the police academy. This time, it was she who brought up our various relations in conversation, mentioning her cousin who had served as Inspector General of the police and my uncle who had served as a Brigadier in the army. She told me later that she dropped these names deliberately, in order to signal to the officer that I belonged to a decent and resourceful family. By bringing up possible common acquaintances, and also by calling the male officer in charge “beta” (son), my mother was much faster at breaking the ice with these official men than I could ever be. Nevertheless, I was, at first, frustrated by what I saw as my family’s excessive interference in my fieldwork. I thought my mother’s presence would compromise my research in a number of ways. First, I was concerned it would undermine any suggestion of professionalism on my part. Interlocutors would see me as a child, undertaking a school assignment rather than as a researcher working on a professional project. Second, I feared my mother’s presence would undermine confidentiality and interfere with my ability to foster rapport. I could hardly expect women to share confidences with a third-party present, and that too an elder before whom they might feel obliged to present a deferential and normative self. Third, I worried my mother might interfere in my strategies for data collection, for instance by making comments about my line of questions or my appearance (both of these things she was in the habit of doing). All these reservations did deserve consideration, as my mother’s presence did shape my reception in the field, and it did color how people saw 2  The training program was put on indefinite hold, and I was therefore forced to work in Karachi instead.

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my project. But rather than undermine my professionalism, her presence reinforced a sense of my membership and belonging within the Pakistani context, and my distance from the US context, which can sometimes provoke hostility and suspicion among locals. My mother’s chaperonage made people see me as less foreign and alien, less American and dangerous. I don’t know if her presence compromised confidence, but since she only accompanied me to two interviews, her attendance did not inhibit the development of relationships that came to be the eventual source of disclosure. But most importantly, my mother’s presence made me more legible to interlocutors, because my use of her mirrored some of the strategies that policewomen and health workers used to navigate the male-­ dominated contexts of their work. Thus, my mother’s escort prompted sympathy from my interlocutors, who began to work to reassure my mother with stories about their own parents’ and siblings’ anxieties about their safety and their own arduous entrée into these fields of work. Like me, many of these women had initially brought relatives to work with them. Some had their husbands wait outside while they worked or trained within. Some brought younger brothers along. One woman had taken her husband’s younger brother with her on an “out-station” assignment to another city. Other women said they had fulfilled this kind of role for their younger siblings and even for their recently widowed mothers. Many women told these stories directly to my mother. Shireen, who was from “interior Sindh” and said she had lived a very sheltered life in “complete purdah,” recounted how terrified she had been when she was first instructed to travel to Karachi and take up residence at the training academy, where she was the only woman recruit. Her father came to drop her off, she said, and stayed for a few days to settle her in. After he left, she said she would keep phoning her parents, and she would cry so much she thought she would pass out with grief. Then her parents phoned a man they knew who was also undergoing training. He was a distant relative. “You know how people in the village all are related to each other,” she said. And this man came up to Shireen and said, “Don’t worry, your brother is here (pointing at his heart). You have nothing to worry about.” The man also informed Shireen that women who had been sent to interior Sindh for training had put in a request for transfer to Karachi. Their request had been granted, and so a small group of women would soon be joining Shireen, so that she would then no longer be the only woman on campus. Shireen said she felt much better after that.

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In addition to recounting stories about their family’s anxieties and strategies of succor, the women tried to reassure my mother by becoming more protective of me and including me in some of their collective strategies for safety and privacy. Thus, their consideration for my mother’s anxiety facilitated my entrée into what I came to think of as women’s collective purdah practices, which I perhaps would not otherwise have discovered. Women provided each other with privacy and safety in a number of ways. They used the buddy system, trying to go about their work or to the restroom in pairs or small groups. They shared taxis or got on buses together. Those who had cars (very few did) would give the others a lift. Women warned each other about men (and also women) to steer clear of. They gave each other information about navigating distances, telling each other what buses to take, and where they could find a restroom or water or refreshment when they arrived. When one was sent out to perform a task alone and in an unfamiliar location, the other women would help her plot the course, phoning friends or relatives who might have information about transport or who lived nearby and could provide a place for the woman to rest. Their mutual need for protection and shelter made purdah into a formidable tool for forging not just interdependence but also connection. By participating in some of these collective (and connective) strategies, I came to see purdah as a useful tool for ethnography. Purdah, I realized, doesn’t just facilitate mobility (the ability to enter public spaces in non-­ disruptive ways), it also eases connection (between women). Since it is in part a collective practice, one involving sympathy and succor, purdah generates an often-pleasurable feeling of social connection among the women who practice it. As an ethnographer who succumbed to the various dependencies purdah required, I also experienced purdah’s pleasures. I enjoyed my mother’s company in the field and the responses her presence generated, but most of all, I enjoyed the camaraderie and sense of belonging I reaped through her presence. This, more than many of my other ethnographic strategies, marked me as being like the other women, purdah compliant.

Modality 2: Enduring Privation While my mother’s protection helped me, it couldn’t render me impervious to the suffering that visits those who attempt to breach the gendered boundaries of the state’s various arenas and offices. Despite my middle-­ class privileges and the aid my participants generously provided, I could

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not escape some of the brutal inconveniences that result when a woman penetrates into male-coded official spaces. Like my interlocutors, I had to manage these privations by enacting a flexibility that extracted high costs from my body and my sense of dignity. On one such occasion, I had been invited to meet with a high-ranking officer at one of the police headquarters in the city.3 I arrived on time but was told that the officer, who had been patrolling all night, was currently resting and had requested that I wait. But there was nowhere to wait. There was nothing outside the officer’s office but barren, dusty corridors and broken-down chairs. Worse, I had traveled a great distance in a rickshaw and desperately needed to use the restroom. Slightly embarrassed, I asked the men on duty where I might find one. “There is no ladies washroom,” they told me, looking just as embarrassed. This headquarters was located in a male-dominated commercial part of the city, surrounded with car mechanic workshops, chemical wholesalers, metal casters, and the odd electronics repair shop. There were no malls or coffee shops where I might find a bathroom. I was in despair and it must have shown on my face because one of the men seemed to take pity on me. “You can use the men’s bathroom,” he said, “I’ll see that it’s empty before you go in and I’ll stand guard outside.” The bathroom consisted of a medium-sized outer room with three broken sinks and one semi-functional one. The outer door was hanging off its hinges and couldn’t be shut. There were three stalls. Two had no door at all, and the third had a door but no latch or lock. I had to hold it closed with my hand. There were no hooks for my bag or my headscarf. The toilet was a hole in the ground affair, and it looked like it had never been cleaned. I almost sobbed at having to use such a dirty and insecure toilet. I also wasn’t sure if I could trust the man who had offered to stand guard outside and was consequently fearful. This experience brought home to me why my participants so frequently complained about the police station as an inhospitable space for women. And after this episode, I imitated the women I was studying by severely limiting my water intake during daylight hours when I would be away from home. This practice took a toll on my health, just as it takes a toll on the health of the women I was mimicking (see also Phadke et al. 2011).

3  “Headquarters” refers to the offices of senior police officers—often those who joined via the civil service route. These offices are different from station houses, which are intended to process those accused of crime and to interface with the public.

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I recount this instance because it says something about the ways that women’s privacy-seeking practices go beyond the veils, or zenanahs, that dominate our imagination when we think about purdah. This episode, which I find humiliating to recount, highlights just how deep the privations go, necessitating work to manage not just our feelings of dignity and shame but also our biological processes: the timing of our food and water consumption. It brought home to me precisely what women meant when they spoke about purdah as the provision of privacy and a form of luxury enjoyed by the elite. For working-class women, purdah is a corporeal modality, one requiring interventions into the function of their bodies and their health. Women compromise their well-being in an effort to preserve their privacy and dignity and to avoid humiliating episodes like the one I experienced. They forego drinking water because they know they won’t have access to bathrooms. Since some of the spaces they are assigned to work are, like the headquarters I visited, located in areas of male-dominated commerce with no restaurants or tea shops that women can visit, they sometimes also go without food.4 But the privations they endure in service to purdah are not merely dietary. The norms of purdah also require women to preserve a physical distance from their male colleagues in order to safeguard their respectability. Women therefore try to maintain a spatial distance from men by sitting or standing apart from them. This means that they sometimes have to forego chairs or the shelter of a canopy and occupy less congenial positions within a space. When instructed to report to a distant location, women prefer to walk long distances instead of getting on motorbikes with male colleagues.5 These forms of self-denial take a toll on the body, causing aches and pains, dizziness, and disorientation. Women mask these physical symptoms by taking over-the-counter pills, such as ibuprofen or even by abusing restricted muscle relaxants such as Lexotanil (bromazepam). Some women chew tobacco, some smoke. Unsurprisingly, many women, especially health workers, report passing out in the midst of their duties.

4  Local tea shops, known as dhabas, are rarely hospitable to women. Thus, middle-class feminists in 2013 initiated a movement called Girls at Dhabas, a social media intervention that seeks to start a conversation about women’s lack of access to public space in Pakistan. 5  Women have begun driving motorbikes, the most prevalent form of transport for the working class in Karachi, but it is still rare to see women do so.

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In suffering such privations, these Pakistani women are not unlike poor or working-class women in other contexts, like the agricultural workers in the Beed district in Maharashtra, India, who opt for hysterectomies in order to avoid having to deal with menstruation in the field (Chatterjee 2019) or the Nabisco factory workers in California who were ordered by supervisors to urinate in their clothes while working on the production line or face three-day suspensions for using the toilet (Linder and Ingrid 1998). But for working-class Pakistani women, corporeal adversities of this kind are expressed and solved through the notion of purdah, which makes endurance a classed expression of the search for dignity and honor. But to understand how these gendered hardships are connected with ideas about honor and dignity, and to understand what privacy means in these working-class contexts, it was necessary for me to share in the privation purdah demands in return for the rewards it supplies to dignity. Through these privations, I understood not only the tolls purdah extracts from working-class women’s well-being, but also the dividends it generates for the patriarchal state. By doing purdah in their state-service work, women don’t just keep themselves safe, but they also preserve the state from needing to meaningfully integrate working-class women into its engines.

Modality 3: Veiling as Self-defense Besides an armor against humiliation, purdah, in both its metaphoric and its concrete forms, can also serve as a shield against possible violence. I came to learn about its defensive properties through my interaction in the field with senior men. The first such encounter took place in the offices of a District Inspector General (DIG) of police in Karachi. Soon after I had received formal permission to undertake research with policewomen in Karachi, the DIG in charge of a specific department of particular interest to me was replaced with a new one. The new DIG, who I shall call Khalid, was not well disposed to my project and asked me to come and see him personally in his office. I went with my journalist friend, Nadia. She dressed like she does when out on assignment, in jeans and a kurta, a scarf wound loosely around her neck, and her waist-long black hair loosely hanging down her back. I dressed the way I used to when I went out to film interviews in my former job as a TV producer in Karachi, in a shalwar kameez with a scarf hanging off one shoulder. But apparently, both of us had picked outfits too immodest for this police officer. A bearded man

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with a prayer mark (a discoloration on the forehead that is locally understood to result from frequent prayer and therefore to indicate piety), he sat signing papers at his desk and refused at any point in the interview to look directly at us (we took this as a sign of modesty but also of critique). Ali, the former DIG and the friend of a friend, was sitting in a chair across the desk from the new DIG trying to facilitate the encounter. “Why don’t you give DIG sahib your proposal,” he suggested to me. I handed my one-page proposal over to the new DIG, but before I got very far into explaining what I wanted to do he interrupted me, saying in English, “Just tell me one thing: If I wanted to go to the US and see how they train their police, would they let me?” He asked. “Why should my country’s information go there? This is going to the US, yes? Why should I allow?” I was nonplussed. I didn’t expect such a question at this stage in the permission process. I had been going back and forth, discussing the details of my fieldwork with various officials in the Karachi police for over a year by now. Feeling stumped, I said, “Sir, I am a Pakistani citizen,” but he cut me off. “But this is going there,” he said. Ali, the former DIG, tried to cajole him by saying, “She has been allowed already,” but Khalid went on complaining, “I have reservations about this. The department has sensitive information about our strengths and weaknesses. Why should another country find out what my staff is doing, how they are learning, what they can do?” I tried to explain to him that I wasn’t looking to reveal state secrets, but to understand a theoretical issue to do with gender and the habitus, but he kept shaking his head. To break the tension in the room, Nadia asked Khalid, “Why do you have such few women serving here in Sindh? There are so many in KP province, they’re doing amazing work and are getting a lot of coverage in the media.” He didn’t respond, so I said, “Yes, the KP women have been covered by the French media, the British, the American, and that was what attracted me to this field site. It showed the complexity of gender arrangements in Pakistan. Everyone thinks that Muslim women are oppressed,” I said, “but here there appears to be a different story.” This argument apparently resonated with Khalid who appeared somewhat mollified. He spoke at length about Muslim values and women’s rights in Islam before finally agreeing to let me do the research I had already received permission to undertake. After this encounter, I learned to adopt a number of literal and metaphoric veils in my encounters with senior men in my various field sites. These men, I learned, did not want to hear about feminism or inequality.

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They did not wish to hear about the theoretical details that had shaped my research questions, and they didn’t care about Bourdieu or about feminist state theory. They were concerned only about my connection to the West and my loyalty to Pakistan. Whenever I went to meet official men thereafter, I tried to project a modest identity. I wore a dupatta around my head, dispensed with makeup, and played up my childlike looks. It went so far that after one terrorist survival training session a senior cop, apparently taking me for a child, put his hand on my head and said, “Beti, (daughter) did you also manage to fire a gun?” (see Skidmore 2009). I didn’t act stupid, but I did try to say as little as possible and to question only in an open-ended, simplistic way (not like a journalist but like a student). I made a point of never repeating to one person what another had told me. I also revealed very little about my life in Virginia, who I lived with there, what I wore, what I ate, and whether I had American friends or not. And in each meeting, I used a line that went something like this: “Everyone thinks Muslim women are oppressed, but look, here they are firing guns!” Such statements were very generative. In three different difficult encounters, such claims from me led to long monologues from men who lectured me on Muslim values and western hypocrisy before ultimately letting me carry on with my field work. Such veiling of my intellect, my emotions, my critiques of gender arrangements in Pakistan, and my ideas about women’s competencies and their contributions felt uncomfortable and duplicitous. I felt like I was playing an unsavory double game. I wasn’t just deceiving my interlocutors; I was betraying my feminist values by letting these men think I was simpler and softer than I am. Yet, such subterfuge was necessary for someone investigating a set of securitized contexts in Pakistan while associated with the West. I knew also that the outward signs of my modesty and my childlike simplicity would be small protection if I did inadvertently come across as a threat to individuals or to the reputation of their institutions. The danger of my position was frequently brought home to me not only in jokes from my informants, who would laughingly ask me if I was a spy, but also through the disappearances and arrests (on sedition and like charges) of journalists, academics, and writers who had gone too far in their critique of the State. My mother and my friends constantly worried that I would say the wrong thing in front of the wrong person and get into serious trouble. I’m not alone in having had to deal with such suspicions about my research. In her book Delusional States, Nosheen Ali (2019) describes fielding similar suspicions about her loyalties, suspicions that

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ultimately wound up impacting her research plans, forcing her to leave the field earlier than she had intended. And yet, there’s another reason this kind of veiling went against the grain for me. Hiding truths about myself triggered new questions around the negotiation of power, intensifying the two-boat dilemma I was already navigating. Feminist scholars have long told us that various forms of power—social, political, economic, racial, and so on—shape the production of knowledge, such as social science theory, by helping to privilege some voices and discourses (e.g., those produced by western academics) and erasing or marginalizing those of others (e.g., those of actors located in the global south) (see Harding 1992; Smith 1993; Hartsock 1998; Hill Collins 2009). To mitigate some of these power imbalances, feminist scholars have advised researchers, who typically have more power than those they study, to be as open as possible about their identity and their purpose. They suggest that ethnographers loyal to feminist ideals should embrace strategies of disclosure and rigorous honesty, reflexivity, and dialogue (e.g., see Devault 1999; Gottfried 1996; Harding 1992; Hartsock 1998; Naples 2013; Smith 1993). Yet, as Meera Sehgal (2009) notes, such prescriptions are impossible to uphold for ethnographers studying potentially violent actors who, while they may be disadvantaged in terms of academic discourse, nevertheless wield a different kind of power that the researcher does not possess. In her field work with women from the Rashtra Sevika Samiti, a right-wing Hindu organization with a “documented proclivity toward violence,” Sehgal says she felt compelled to by-­ pass some of the feminist principles she had taken with her into the field. If she was to stay safe, she realized, she would have to mask various aspects of her feminist, liberal identity from her interlocutors and step into the field as a veiled ethnographer. Duplicitous as it may feel, such veiling is not only protective but also generative. By veiling in self-defense, I came to see how purdah was connected with risk and safety not just for me, the ethnographer, but also for the women agents of state security I was studying. Purdah norms don’t just confound women’s ability to carry out security work, I learned, rather security work also complicates women’s ability to practice purdah even as it exacerbates these needs. For to perform their security duties women must visibly step out of gendered privacy and inhabit public spaces, they must stand on busy streets searching and frisking citizens, they must trudge from door-to-door vaccinating children, or they must trek up and down plane aisles serving tea. When executing these public duties,

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policewomen and airline attendants are not allowed to cloak their uniforms or conceal their faces—they must declare their connection with the state in order to embody its authority and secure citizen compliance. The self-revelation required by security work can be hazardous for security workers. Since 2012, at least 70 Polio workers have been killed in Pakistan. The police have long been prized targets for terrorists and several are killed in attacks each year. Airline attendants’ uniforms make them more visible as targets for sexual harassment. My participants were therefore keenly aware of the danger of their jobs. In all three field sites, women talked regularly about the possibility of becoming martyrs and described their work as a form of jihad. Many had close friends and family members who had been killed in the line of duty. Many talked about buying  life insurance policies to safeguard their children’s futures. As such, women talked about purdah not just as a shield for securing reputations, they also discussed purdah as a mask for their association with the state, a slender form of protection against physical harm from those who hold a grudge against state agents. The defensive properties of purdah were brought home to me by my own use of veiling as self-defense. By drawing on its protective properties I came to see purdah not just as a form of seclusion or segregation, nor just a simple matter of veils, but as a painful, risky, and ultimately tenuous project working-class women pursue in their quest for privacy, dignity, and safety within the exacting arenas of the gendered state.

Failures Just as practicing purdah provides a pathway to dignity, connection, and safety for women, forgoing its modalities can make for isolation, humiliation, and danger. I learned these lessons the hard way when, after a year of field work, I let down my guard at an academy that I visited regularly. Since this academy was located off the Uber circuit, deep in the heart of an industrial zone, I usually went to it in a hired Taxi and with a hired companion in tow. My mother came with me the first couple of times, but after she had to go back to her own job, I hired a woman whose husband worked as a custodian in my apartment building to chaperone me on my research journeys. The arrangement was not ideal. Her time was expensive, and her presence also created a number of anxieties for me with regard to her comfort. While I was willing to go without water or lunch, to walk long distances, and to hop onto rickety, kidney-crunching

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rickshaws, I was less willing to ask someone else to do so on my behalf. Thus, I tried to limit my reliance on her as much as I could. In my health workers’ sites, I quickly made friends and therefore needed no chaperone after the first couple of visits. At women’s police stations and at airline offices, I never felt like I needed a companion. But the location, size, and arrangement of this particular police academy did make me feel the need for a travel buddy, and so when I travelled there, Surraiya went with me. At the sprawling academy, Surraiya would mostly sit in the garden outside the office where I was working; she would listen to the radio or talk on her cell phone. Sometimes she took a nap on a chair in the corner. The academy always provided us with lunch, a gesture of hospitality from the officer in charge, with whom I had become friendly. We were also provided with a room and attached bathroom, so I had less reason to worry for Surraiya’s comfort. Nevertheless, I felt it must be boring for her to sit around all day with only her phone for company, and the need for her presence kept chafing at me. Thus, after a year’s worth of visits to the academy, when I started to feel more confident of the route and more familiar with the people employed there, I began to make my way to the academy alone. I still wore head veil and modest clothes, keeping my hair tied demurely and my face free from make-up, but I dispensed with my chaperone and drove to the site alone. I undertook these changes just as the batch of women I’d come to know graduated and was replaced with a new group of women, most of them strangers to me. As I began to interview these newcomers, I realized to my horror that some of them were circulating stories about my purported relationship with one of the senior men at the academy. I learned about these stories as women began asking with greater frequency that I intervene with him on their behalf. At first, I was bewildered by these requests, I would laugh and say, “I have no power here, I’m just a researcher, a student from the US.” Finally, one woman replied, “Who can have more power over him than you?” From her and other women I came to learn that my habit of showing up alone, in my own car, hanging out by myself for hours in an office that was set aside for my use, had caused women to speculate about my respectability. While I was somewhat embarrassed by these stories, they didn’t really bother me. After all, I was going to leave soon and travel too far from this location to be hurt in any material way by gossip. Moreover, my class position shields me to a large extent from reputational concerns. Westernized women from elite family backgrounds aren’t often as deeply affected by gossip—our families rarely react

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violently, and our relative wealth protects us from some of the economic costs of stepping out of line (i.e., the threat to jobs or marriageability). But gossip and speculation of this kind does hurt other women in various ways. This episode made me think of the various times women gossiped to me about other women or tried to keep me from talking to women they thought were “too fast.” On one such occasion, I had been attending a health worker meeting and, as it wound up, I fell into conversation with a tall, slim woman named Zeeba. Zeeba wore her highlighted hair in a bob, uncovered by any kind of veil. She was wearing a short tunic, locally referred to as a kurti, over stonewashed jeans. Since almost everyone else in the room, including me, was either wearing an abaya or wrapped up in a large chador, lovingly embroidered with mirrors and colorful thread, Zeeba stood out. I was therefore curious about her and started talking to her. Her conversation was very lively and entertaining. She told me about her battle with facial hair and I laughed when Meera, my host and friend, marched up to us and tried to break up our conversation with various interruptions. First, she told me, rather abruptly, to come meet various other women. I told her to give me a minute. She hovered and kept interrupting, talking over Zeeba to make comments like, “See that is Nasreen, I especially wanted you to meet Nasreen.” Finally, after a few more minutes she cut Zeeba off in the midst of a story about the dangers of Polio vaccination work, saying, “Fauzia has to go now, we have an appointment with Doctor Sahib. He is waiting.” Since there was no such appointment, I was slightly confused but got up to go with Meera anyway, hoping she’d help me find Zeeba later. However, as we walked away from the meeting, Meera said, “Aren’t you glad I rescued you from that wrong kind of woman?” I was quite surprised at Meera’s hostile tone, as she was usually very warm in her talk about other LHWs. But Zeeba, according to Meera, was “a waste of my time.” It was obvious from her “get up” that she was only here to “attract doctors” and get “what she could” by flirting and making herself sexually available to them. According to Meera, someone who dressed like that couldn’t possibly need money (one justifiable reason for women to enter paid work) nor could she care about women’s health (a concern that transformed health work into an honorable occupation for women). Gossip labeling certain women as “loose,” “fast,” or “the wrong sort” was common in all three of my field sites. Women told colorful stories about the wrong kind of women among them—women who wore makeup and laughed when they talked to men, women who did not veil, women

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who purportedly provided colleagues and bosses with sex in exchange for various favors. In the women’s police station, Lubna, a constable, complained bitterly about a fellow constable she worked with on the evening shift named Anam. “Anam never comes to work on time,” Lubna said, “and she sometimes doesn’t bother to show up at all.” But she gets away with her poor attendance, Lubna claimed, because she has made “some sort of arrangement” with the head mohrer (person in charge of records). Later, when we became friendlier, Lubna expanded on this theme, claiming that Anam was sleeping with the mohrer and “has become his girlfriend” in exchange for more relaxed timing. Other women claimed that some of their colleagues would get friendly with men at work and exchange sex for gifts as paltry as barbecue parties, Pizza Hut pizza, and KFC burgers. In the airline too, women pointed fingers at other women, telling me to steer clear of them. Nazish was one such woman. The others claimed she had “influential boyfriends,” Ministers in the government who protected her from disciplinary action. Meanwhile, Afshan supposedly slept with colleagues in exchange for better route assignments. Women who had been negatively branded by such gossip in turn pointed fingers at other women, describing them as dirty and deserving of punishment. For instance, Sana, a policewoman accused by gossip of being dirty, both in terms of corruption and sexual morality, spent several minutes criticizing Qandeel Baloch, a victim of honor killing. Qandeel deserved everything she got, Sana claimed, because she had discounted the male pride and honor of her brother when she crossed the lines of decency. Purdah, therefore, is at least in part a shield against other women. And while the practices that sustain purdah are collective, they are also exclusive—casting those who transgress purdah norms as the wrong sort. These exclusive modalities of purdah not only isolate the victims of gossip, making other women wary of cultivating friendships with them, but they also isolate women who find themselves in complicated situations, leaving them without the benefit of advice or other forms of aid from their women colleagues. For instance, a policewoman named Sarah had received sexual overtures from one of her bosses but was afraid to discuss this situation with other women for fear they might blame her for inviting his advances. Other women, like Mehr, were afraid to discuss problems they were facing at home with an abusive husband for fear that discussion of these private woes might cast them in a negative light. Many of these women welcomed the opportunity to discuss such issues with me, an outsider and in their eyes a vague, ill-defined expert. Women would take me

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aside and say that they wanted to discuss problems that had been distressing them and which, they didn’t feel safe to talk to anyone else about. They would tell me about sons who had gotten into drugs, husbands who were unable to provide any kind of support, and men who offered to take them on as second wives. They told me about petty thefts they had committed and feeling guilty afterwards, about extremes of poverty they had endured and going hungry for days, and about how it felt to forego marriage in order to raise and care for siblings who were not always grateful for the sacrifices made in their name. Women said they had no one to share these stories with, that they felt lonely and depressed for having to carry them alone. They kept these painful secrets because exposing them would compromise their family’s respectability and honor. “We keep a purdah on other people’s faults,” Rasheeda explained, “in the hopes that God will in turn veil our faults for us.” Thus, purdah is not only about seeking privacy through segregation from men, but it can also involve masking those indiscretions, faults, or abuses, which women fear could compromise their honor and the dignity of their family and community. As an outsider and an expert, I received some of these confidences, but by revealing them I might be guilty of violating some of the norms of purdah my participants were at such pains to uphold. To expose such indiscretions is itself a form of indiscretion, a vulgar impulse to broadcast dirt and bring more publicity to things that it would be more decent to sweep out of sight. Unlike the women who stay silent in order to preserve the dignity of their families and their communities, an ethnographer upends norms of privacy, and in doing so, blithely compromises the dignity of her entire nation. And that, too, is a dilemma of a two-boat kind of ethnography—a series of violations we commit in the name of a foreign science.

Conclusion I began this chapter with a description of what I called a two-boat dilemma: a set of problems I encountered when trying to tether western academe with the Pakistani world of purdah through my fieldwork. The disjuncture between these two worlds is illustrated by my paradoxical situation in having to do purdah while simultaneously being told by western feminists that there is no such thing. But by opting to stick with the term purdah and adopting some of its modalities, I was able to harvest valuable new

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insights about the various ways that working-class women seek dignity as they inhabit new public roles in the Pakistani state. I learned that purdah is not merely about styling the body with veils or headscarves but that it entails a complex set of classed practices aimed at securing dignity and privacy in the public arena. These practices are not the solo projects of individual women seeking mobility through government jobs; they are collective endeavors requiring cooperation from family members, colleagues, friends, and other women. Despite their collective character, however, purdah practices can be painful, requiring women to endure severe privations and undertake grueling effort to manage the body’s processes, its hunger and its need for relief through shelter and toilets. In embracing purdah, women experience loneliness as they sometimes feel called upon to conceal the various abuses they face in order to safeguard their family’s honor or that of their community. This last modality of purdah, the imperative to mask indiscretion, is one that I as an ethnographer must perpetually violate. By revealing the privations and indiscretions I witnessed in the field, I run the risk of betraying the very privacy I document through my work, which is both painfully obtained and precious to the larger community that is also my native land. Negotiating the two-boat dilemma, therefore, means learning to navigate secrets and lies, both forms of concealment that my ethnography has required me to grapple with. On the one hand, it has asked me to veil aspects of myself I would prefer not to hide. On the other, it has required me to reveal aspects of my subjects’ lives that some in the Pakistani community and in the western academe would prefer me to conceal. Concealing and lying are both connected according to Simmel (1906). They are, he suggests, part of a larger suite of strategies that people use in pursuit of secrecy. Secrecy, he tells us is a sociological form, not just something an individual does for her own benefit but also a kind of social glue that helps bind members to their groups. Just as reciprocal knowledge is a condition of social relationships—we have to know something about each other to connect—so is ignorance and concealment such a condition. Not knowing something about someone makes it possible to maintain ties with them that we might otherwise sever. While lies might sometimes break up social situations, they also sometimes act as integrating elements, ensuring their constitution. Thus, the revelation that ethnographic work aims to accomplish is not only connected with issues of honor and dishonor, but it is also directly linked with the continuity or rupture of various social relationships. To investigate and reveal that which various actors in our field sites

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would prefer to conceal is not only to infringe on the honor of a community, but it is also to potentially disrupt the various social relationships— economic, political, and personal—that serve it. When an ethnographer undertakes fieldwork in her home country for a foreign academy, she must therefore ask herself a set of questions about concealment and revelation. She must ask: Who or what set of relationships does a secret preserve? What does the hiding of abuse accomplish, for whom, and at what cost? Because the revelation of secrets can lead to a new definition of a social situation and a new alignment of power, a scholar with ties to a local context might find that she is willing to reveal abuses that western scholars and local actors would prefer, for a variety of reasons, to leave alone. Locals worry not only about the reputations of their community, but also about the relationships that are predicated on those reputations, relationships involving the transfer of aid money or of cooperative endeavors. International scholars, in contrast, worry about empowering discourses they have worked hard to counter—discourses that reinforce particular configurations of power by highlighting the shortcomings of Muslims or non-Westerners. But rather than succumb to the silencing pressures of both these shores, the scholar astride two boats must befriend the disruption, the discomfort, and perhaps even the dishonor that is an inevitable consequence of her difficult balancing act. By enacting a disloyalty to both the academy and the powerful critics in her home country, such an ethnographer can attempt to remain true to her subjects—the women whose labors and outlays would be obscured if two-­ boat ethnographers succumbed to the local and global imperatives to conceal.

References Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2002. Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others. American Anthropologist 104 (3): 783–790. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2002.104.3.783. Ali, Nosheen. 2019. Delusional States : Feeling Rule and Development in Pakistan’s Northern Frontier. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chatterjee, Patralekha. 2019. Hysterectomies in Beed District Raise Questions for India. The Lancet (British Edition) 394 (10194): 202–202. https://doi. org/10.1016/S0140-­6736(19)31669-­1. DeVault, Marjorie L. 1999. Liberating Method: Feminism and Social Research. Philadelphia, Temple University Press.

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Gottfried, Heidi. 1996. Feminism and Social Change  : Bridging Theory and Practice. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Haque, Riffat. 2020. The Institution of Purdah: A Feminist Perspective. Pakistan Journal of Gender Studies. 1 (1): 47–71. Harding, Sandra G. 1992. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women’s Lives. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hartsock, Nancy C.M. 1998. The Feminist Standpoint Revisited and Other Essays. Boulder, Colo: Westview Press. Hill Collins, Patricia. 2009. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Hoang, Kimberly Kay. 2015. Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520960688. Husain, Fauzia. 2020. Halal Dating, Purdah, and Postfeminism: What the Sexual Projects of Pakistani Women Can Tell Us About Agency. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 45 (3): 629–652. https://doi.org/10.1086/ 706470. Kugelman, Michael. 2017. Why Pakistan Hates Malala. Foreign Policy, August 15. https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/15/why-­pakistan-­hates-­malala/. Linder, Marc, and Nygaard Ingrid. 1998. Void Where Prohibited : Rest Breaks and the Right to Urinate on Company Time. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press. Masood, Ayesha. 2019. Doing Gender, Modestly: Conceptualizing Workplace Experiences of Pakistani Women Doctors. Gender, Work, and Organization 26 (2): 214–228. https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12308. Mirza, Jasmin. 2002. Between Chaddor and the Market : Female Office Workers in Lahore. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Naples, Nancy A. 2013. Feminism and Method: Ethnography, Discourse Analysis, and Activist Research. Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/ 9781315889245. Narayan, Uma. 1998. Essence of Culture and a Sense of History: A Feminist Critique of Cultural Essentialism. Hypatia 13 (2): 86–106. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/j.1527-­2001.1998.tb01227.x. Papanek, Hanna. 1973. Purdah: Separate Worlds and Symbolic Shelter. Comparative Studies in Society and History 15 (3): 289–325. https://doi. org/10.1017/S001041750000712X. Phadke, Shilpa, Khan Sameera, and Ranade Shilpa. 2011. Why Loiter?  : Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets. New Delhi: Penguin Books. Sehgal, M. 2009. The Veiled Feminist Ethnographer: Fieldwork Among Women of India’s Hindu Right. In Women Fielding Danger: Negotiating Ethnographic Identities in Field Research, ed. M.  Huggins and M.  Glebbeek, 325–352. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

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Simmel, Georg. 1906. The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies. The American Journal of Sociology 11 (4): 441–498. https://doi.org/10.1086/ 211418. Skidmore, M. 2009. Secrecy and trust in the affective field: Conducting fieldwork in Burma. In In Women Fielding Danger : Negotiating Ethnographic Identities in Field Research, ed. Martha Knisely Huggins and Marie-Louise Glebbeek. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Smith, Dorothy. 1993. Knowing a Society from Within: A Woman’s Standpoint. In Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings, ed. Charles Lemert. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Taj, Farhat. 2004. Policing in Purdah: Women and Women Police Station, Peshawar, NWFP, Pakistan. Bergen: Center for Women’s and Gender Research, University of Bergen. Visweswaran, Kamala. 1994. Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

CHAPTER 7

Interweaving Afro-Asian Solidarity: A Global Textile Factory Floor in Ethiopia Manjusha Nair

Rahel and Almaz worked in an Indian-owned denim textile factory in Bishoftu, near Addis Ababa, which I visited in October–November 2018. They laundered denim cloth in shades of blue and black. They were teens, studied up to grade 10, and lived with their families in Bishoftu, a mile away from the factory. In the evenings, Rahel studied for a garment diploma at Rift Valley University and Almaz studied accounting at a Bishoftu college, seeking to gain employment from the recent Ethiopian The research in Ethiopia was funded by a Faculty Research and Development Award from George Mason University. Deepika Hooda provided valuable research assistance. I thank Amy Quark, Daniel Afzal, Kuruvilla Mathews, Isaac Paul, and Srilaxmi Shanmugham for their comments and suggestions. This book chapter benefitted immensely from the reviews by Gowri Vijayakumar and Smitha Radhakrishnan. Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, at College of William & Mary, and at Ethiopian Civil Service University.

M. Nair (*) George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Radhakrishnan, G. Vijayakumar (eds.), Sociology of South Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97030-7_7

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modernization projects. Vasudev, a manager in the factory, was a middle-­ aged, upper-caste (Brahmin) man from Bihar, who was used to aggressively disciplining workers in India. He found it difficult to control the young workers, women mostly, who did not ease into the work rhythms and left work if they were shouted at. He said that this was because Ethiopia was never colonized and children lacked parental discipline, as if prior colonization reinforced parental discipline in South Asia and made Indian workers obedient to their bosses. One day, Vasudev called Rahel and told her that she had been given 200 pieces of cloth to wash but that she had returned only 192 pieces. What happened to the rest? He was intentionally displaying his managerial authority in front of me. While Rahel struggled to answer, he pointed to his brain playfully and said, “Next time, use this.” Using a suffix to show me respect in Hindi, he told me, “They are kids Manjushaji” (Yeh bacce hai). Rahel, Almaz, and Vasudev belonged to one among the many Chinese, Indian, and Turkish textile and garment units that moved to Ethiopia in the 2010s. These firms towed their machines through the new expressways and train lines that were constructed with Chinese financial and technical aid. Textile and garment firms were lured by cheap labor—five times cheaper than China—and a duty-free export market supported by the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), a partnership signed with the USA.  Growth through modernizing Ethiopia was the unshakeable path taken by Ethiopian governments after democratic reforms in the 1990s. The aim was to break Ethiopia from being trapped in the “backwardness” of famine, poverty, and subsistence farming, and to take advantage of its “demographic dividend”—50  million youth ready to work (Admassie et al. 2017).1 Migrations and flows of Asian capital, entrepreneurs, educators, skilled and unskilled workers, and commodities to Africa have been on the rise since 2000. They reminded me of the dynamic histories of social and cultural exchange that symbolized the transcontinental Indian Ocean networks (Bose 2009). As the era of European colonialism ended, these networks inspired the visions of Afro-Asian solidarity that characterized the Bandung conference in Indonesia in 1955 (McCann 2019). Nevertheless, it was not until the end of the Cold War and the domination 1  Ethiopia’s growing youth population is considered by economists and policy makers as a sign of high potential for economic growth that might generate a demographic dividend if tapped with the appropriate human resource management and investment policies.

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of free market ideals and open economies that new directions of Asian and African connections emerged. Many of these new interactions, due to their extractive nature, have been characterized as a new scramble for African resources, portraying them as resurrecting the colonial forms of domination that resulted in African penury (Bond and Garcia 2015; see also Morvaridi and Hughes 2018). Defying such metanarratives of Asian neocolonialism in Africa through resource extraction, empirical studies have pointed to more complicated engagements on the ground (Bräutigam 2009; Lee 2017). What possibilities for development and solidarity are generated in the interactions between Indians and Ethiopians during textile and garment making? And how do these experiences and practices constitute the specific contours of “global” Indian capital? In October–November of 2018, I conducted research in an Indian-­ owned denim textile unit in Ethiopia, 31 miles from the capital of Addis Ababa. I interviewed Indian and Ethiopian managerial staff and shop floor workers and observed them in the factory environment. I found that the Indian and Ethiopian interactions ranged from paternalistic kinship to camaraderie, drawing from multiple registers of developmental hierarchies, racial imaginaries, civilizational similarities, postcolonial solidarity, and Global South citizenship. These registers interplayed with shop floor divisions based on authority, gender, age, and skills, and they produced practices of transparency, discipline, good will, protectiveness, and morality. All of those patterned and spontaneous interactions, practices, and narratives shaped the contours of Indian global capital, which cannot be labeled solely as either neocolonialism (appropriation from above) or Afro-Asian solidarity (horizontal camaraderie). Textile and garment production in Indian-owned factories in Ethiopia did follow the logic of the North-centered global market that cheapened labor and rendered human beings redundant in the production process (Ferguson 2015). Yet, I argue in this chapter that this production process was devoid of the violence and dehumanization associated with colonial and imperial capitalism. Unlike cases of colonialism, the Indian factory owners did not engage in the othering of the Africans as the dangerous classes, over-sexualize women, or negate the very right for the colonized to exist. Though far from the old visions of postcolonial solidarity, Indian and Ethiopian interactions generated new possibilities of humanist practices, which emerged from their shared subjecthood on the periphery of the Global North-determined world order.

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Afro-Asian Solidarity or Neocolonialism? There are many who see the possibilities of a multipolar phase in global capitalism in the South-South capital flows, where southern markets and expertise could make an impact (Guerrero 2013), outside of the dominance of western institutions (Glenn 2008; Vieira and Alden 2011). Yet, these new interactions alarmingly resemble the old colonial pattern of depleting Africa of natural resources, such as crude oil and copper, while flooding the African market with consumer merchandise. In 2014, 84 percent of Indian imports from sub-Saharan Africa were raw materials, while 64 percent of exports were consumer goods (Sy 2015). Rumors of China’s entangling of Africans in debt traps and slavery-like labor processes and India’s seizure of indigenous lands, often with the help of the gate-­keeping African elites, are aplenty. The Gupta Scandal, in which an immigrant Indian family founded a multi-million mining empire through alleged “state capture,” led to the resignation of the South African president Jacob Zuma in 2018 (Kuo and Chutel 2016). The Gupta family supposedly manipulated cabinet appointments, misallocated finances and minerals, and controlled state-owned enterprises. The oldest brother of the family, Ajay Gupta, has been declared a fugitive from justice by the South African police. All of these issues have led many to characterize the rising interest of India and China in Africa as a “re-scramble for Africa” by global powers with neocolonial ambitions (Bond and Garcia 2015). The question was raised by scholars about whether the economic hardships created by the flight of western capital and the location of the African states in the periphery and semi-periphery of the world system could be compensated by a new invasion of southern capital (Martin 2008). Confronting such grand narratives of neocolonialist resource extraction, scholars have pointed to more complicated engagements on the ground. Sharad Chari suggests that Indian (and Chinese) capital in the African continent may, indeed, draw from very different Asian legacies and could contribute to what one might defensively call “development” (Chari 2015). Ching Kwan Lee (2017) famously argued in her recent work on Chinese investments in Zambia that Chinese state capital was different from global capital, including Indian; while the former sought political and other gains beyond profit and offered new directions to African development, the latter was purely profit-oriented. Mohan (2013) has argued for the need to go beyond the accepted wisdom of enclaves of development (Ferguson 2005) and examine the variety of projects with a variety

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of outcomes based on local political contexts and economic characteristics. What is missing in these accounts is an understanding of the embeddedness of African development in global neoliberal capital. Contemporary South-South flows, devoid of the radical potential of the original formulation, function within the neoliberal world order (Morvaridi and Hughes 2018). Just as the aspirations of India as a global player are shaped by its own opening of the economy in the 1990s to a global market order, most African states have opened their borders for Asian investment because of their own engagements with global capitalism. Though Ethiopia never participated in the Washington Consensus, it is still enormously engaged with the Northern economies in the form of trade partnerships, developmental aid, and markets. As I show later, the textile and manufacturing industry in Ethiopia is predicated on the partnerships that allowed duty-­ free exports to the US markets. Not surprisingly, the practices around such engagements also follow a market logic, such as use of young and cheap labor that are not contractually committed to the factories or work. Global Indian capitalists, as agents of global capitalism, reproduce old forms of capitalism—with all its violence and exclusion—through new assemblages of capital, labor, and nature. My ethnographic research in Ethiopia aimed to generate an understanding of how race, gender, and developmental difference emerged and were reshaped in the practices around textile production. While there have been many celebrations of postcolonial Afro-Asian solidarity embedded in a vision of an egalitarian future (Prashad 2002), such redemptive narratives have been criticized for turning a blind eye to the colonial inscriptions of racial difference and hierarchies that have marked such interactions (Burton 2016). One such axis of difference is in the developmental narrative, within which African countries that gained political independence much later than India were considered “backward” and much in need of “developmental help” from the latter. Analyzing Frank Moraes’s 1965 book The Importance of Being Black: An Asian Looks at Africa, on his travels in postcolonial Africa (Moraes was a Times of India editor), Burton suggests that “a major structural feature of the narrative is Moraes’s viewpoint as an Indian observer, looking down [on Addis Ababa from the plane] not simply from his vantage point as an individual but from the promontory view of a nation that has already accomplished what Africans seek to achieve.” Moraes’s remarks on this explicit developmental backwardness of Africa to Asia [to Europe]: “the feeling of an adolescent Africa

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as against a comparatively adult Asia … lingered and haunted me throughout my stay there. It seemed as if Africa bristled with very many angry young men. Like children they felt afraid to walk alone in the dark, but at the same time they were resentful and suspicious of anyone who might light their way” (Moraes 1965, 2–3). A historical precedent to this perspective of developmental difference can be seen in Mahatma Gandhi’s ideas on benevolent gifts of village crafts to Africa (MahatmaGandhiOrg 1946). While Gandhi was residing in Sevagram in the last decade of his life, a few black soldiers from West Africa visited him wanting to know how to fight down the fetters of slavery in a hopelessly divided Africa. They wanted to know what India could give them and how they could achieve cooperative industrialization to be saved from the terrible exploitation. For Gandhi, the West Africans were “the most awakened of the Africans,” on whom the experiment of modern university education had produced “brilliant though queer results.” Gandhi told them of the spinning wheel: “The commerce between India and Africa,” replied Gandhiji, “will be of ideas and services, not of manufactured goods against raw materials after the fashion of Western exploiters. Then, India can offer you the spinning wheel. If I had discovered it when I was in South Africa, I would have introduced it among the Africans who were my neighbours in Phoenix. You can grow cotton, you have ample leisure, and plenty of manual skill. You should study and adopt the lesson of the village crafts we are trying to revive. Therein lies the key to your salvation.” (Ibid.)

While I explored the reimaginations and contestations of this benevolent development narrative in Ethiopia and its racial ramifications, the gendered nature of production in the textile unit complicated the narrative, pointing to the significance of an intersectional understanding of the experiences of work, race, gender, and nationality (Collins 2019). In her study of factory discipline in Taiwanese garment units in KwaZulu-Natal province in South Africa in the 1990s, Gillian Hart (2002) showed how the kinship idioms that characterized disciplinary regimes in export-oriented Asian factories disappeared when transported to Africa. In the Asian factories, women workers were considered family girls who should be trained, not only in industriousness and work culture but also in moral discipline, since they were responsible for export-led national development (Lee 1998; Ong and Freeman 2010; Wolf 1992; Lynch 2007). But in South

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African factories, Hart (2002, 191–192) found that the Taiwanese owners resorted to coercive disciplinary practices, rather than persuasive kinship and domesticity. This is because the Taiwanese owners perceived black women workers as dangerous and inaccessible. Citing Donna Haraway’s interpretation of the experiences of black women under slavery, Hart finds a racialized construction that Taiwanese factories reproduce in KwaZulu-­ Natal (see Haraway 1990; Carby 1987).2 In my previous research on Indian mining firms in South Africa between 2015 and 2017, I found how the racial order of apartheid (not surprisingly) persisted in hiring practices (Nair 2018). This racial ordering by Indians sought spaces of legitimacy within the Indian psyche attuned to colonial discourses on race. Indians employed white South Africans in top executive positions, and they developed a camaraderie with the whites by going on hunting trips and sharing food and drinks. The middle-level managers and experts were from all over the country and of mixed races, while the lower rank of workers were black natives of the province or poor black immigrants. In an Indian-owned iron ore mining company farmhouse in the Northern Cape in South Africa, where the mining executives stayed, Indians refused to have black South African cooks and went without home-cooked food until a Punjabi cook arrived, while the black South Africans cleaned floors and washed clothes. In part this was a continuation of the “cultures of servitude” (Ray and Qayum 2009) in Indian households, where those of the “lower” castes are not allowed in the kitchen but were deemed necessary to do the unclean jobs such as clean toilets, wash dishes, and sweep the yard, or prep vegetables in an outer kitchen. Nevertheless, Indians who worried about work visa renewals were cautious and stayed away from creating friction in the workplace, other than that provided by job uncertainties due to the market volatility for commodity extracts. Ethiopians have historically resisted racialization by claiming a non-­ black habasha identity with Semitic origins, the ability to claim this identity supported by the absence of an explicit colonial legacy, and a postcolonial condition (Habecker 2012). Hence, I did not expect to see a reenactment of the practices documented by Hart or the much mellowed and cautious racialization of South African workers by Indian mining 2  Haraway argues that black enslaved women were constituted in the disciplinary regime racially and sexually as female (sexualized, animal), but not women (human, potential wife). Hart points out that Haraway borrows from Carby in formulating this argument.

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company staff. Yet, the people I interacted with, such as a young municipal officer in Bishoftu, seemed to think that black Ethiopians were “backward” developmentally and educationally. This embodied a discourse of development that placed Ethiopia much lower in the hierarchy of nations— even lower than India. My study intended to explore how development and race was reimagined in the interactions between Ethiopians and Indians in the context of global textile production. In this chapter, I delineate how the narrative of developmental help embeds Indian engagements in Ethiopia, even in the era of neoliberal capitalism. I follow Anna Tsing (2005) in suggesting that the  unequal encounters that characterize global capitalism are never complete and are filled with unique possibilities. My ethnography documents the new arrangements of power, as well as the new contestations of such power, and the altered subjectivities and agencies of both Indians and Ethiopians. These were quite discernable in the vignette of the shop floor that I described in the beginning, where patriarchal work norms morphed into playful paternalism.

Research in Ethiopia Critical global ethnographies generate new understandings of connection and disjuncture, harmonies and contradictions, and alliances and hostilities across bounded spaces, such as nations (Hart 2002). Instead of considering the Indian and Ethiopian interactions as “raw encounters” between two divergent national histories (Lee 2009), I understood them as molded by imagined histories of interconnections that were shaped through the flows of ideas, people, and material goods (Duara 2015). In my ethnographic research in Ethiopia, I intended to capture these interconnections and explore the glimpses of hopes for a future, if any, that were produced through the interactive practices around textile making in Ethiopia. A global branch of a 60-year-old textile group in India, Aishanie Textiles (fictional name), was the second largest textile factory in Africa and the first denim factory that started running in 2015 with state-of-the-art technology capable of producing 12 million meters of fabric a year. Over 80 percent of the denim produced was exported to garment factories in Bangladesh, Turkey, Kenya, and South Africa, producing for brands in the USA and Europe. Cotton was sourced from lower Awash valley and supplied denim locally to the vendors in Ethiopia of US-based apparel

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corporations, such as PVH (Philip Van Heusen), that started production in Hawassa industrial park. Aishanie was situated in the Keta industrial zone in Bishoftu municipality. Drawing on the young labor, tax holidays, and cheap electricity in Ethiopia, there were 102 functioning industries within the municipality manufacturing textiles, noodles, wood, and metals. The young municipal administration employee whom I interviewed strongly said that without these industries “there would be crisis in our country.” Without doubt, industrialization was sought, even at the local end of the bureaucratic hierarchy, as a solution to the ethnic conflicts, resource crises, and economic uncertainty facing the country. My one-month visit to Ethiopia was enabled by a series of introductions centered on my Malayali ethno-linguistic identity, which helped me find my way into the Indian business world in Ethiopia. I was introduced to a Malayali official at the Indian Embassy by a Malayali Professor at the University of Addis Ababa, who introduced me to the Commerce Secretary at the Indian Embassy. The Commerce Secretary introduced me to the Indian Business Forum leaders, who then put me in touch with the Indian executive managers of Aishanie. My introduction to the Aishanie textile factory was at a Middle Eastern restaurant in the bustling Bole district of Addis Ababa, where the Chief Executive Officer fetched me in his personal vehicle. I was cheerily welcomed to a table weighed down with food and drinks and introduced to the Indian managerial staff and Ethiopian retail agents. When I informed them that I had run out of business cards, the CEO offered to print a few for me. Then, he said that I was free to meet everyone and study every aspect of their factory. He insisted that I exchange my phone number with the Ethiopian retail agents. In my more than two decade-long research experiences with Indian industrialists, this earnest welcome was unique. During my recent research on Indian mining in South Africa, the mine’s management, though collaborative, established strict boundaries on what I could do and whom I would meet. Here, the CEO and other managers seemed genuinely interested in having me, an Indian and a researcher from the USA, visit the factory. My presence as a researcher from the USA and an Indian woman in an Indian male-dominated factory enhanced the legitimacy of Indian presence in Ethiopia. In this chapter, I draw on my interviews with one bureaucrat, and two business organization leaders in Addis Ababa, four senior officials, seven middle managers, four supervisors, one union leader, eight shop floor

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workers in Aishanie textiles, and two municipal administration employees in Bishoftu. I would visit the textile factory every morning, and I was given an office. Sometimes I met my interviewees there, but often I would walk to the cubicles of the many departments such as laundry, dyeing, stitching, inspection, and so on, where I would interview the Indian heads of the departments, Ethiopian supervisors, and Ethiopian machine operators and other shop floor workers, who were summoned by the supervisors. The Indian managers moved in and out during the interviews. In most of my interviews with the shop floor workers, I asked the questions in English, which they understood, but replies that were in Amharic or Oromia were translated to me by the supervisor. I was free to walk around the factory and was sometimes accompanied by the Ethiopian supervisorial staff and Indian managers. For the heads of the department, I was like a factory inspector, and they were keen to show me how they handled their state-of-the-art machinery, such as procedures to inspect a defect in the yarn. Some workers saw me as Indian and some saw me as American, and this meant that my presence provoked interesting questions and observations about the USA and India. Though my entry into the field happened through supervisors, the frankness of workers when they talked to me suggested that they did not see me as simply tied to management. The Indians were from all over India, many with experience in the textile industry from Mumbai and Ahmedabad. I talked to them in Hindi, Tamil, and Malayalam and shared a rather unexpected feeling of camaraderie as members of the Indian diaspora. They invited me to their guest house, where I shared my Maggi instant noodle packets with the USA price sticker with them, and they called me whenever they went to Addis Ababa to see off someone. The Ethiopian supervisors, especially the women, found it interesting that I was the first Indian woman to visit the factory, despite their employer adopting the language of employing and empowering women. This language followed Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who during my visit had appointed the first woman president and supreme court chief justice. I also walked around in the surrounding village and talked to residents with the help of a factory employee who accompanied me. I conducted two interviews at Bishoftu municipality through an introduction from another Malayali professor at Ethiopian Civil Service University. I had numerous conversations with people whom I met during my visit, such as taxi drivers, guest house owners and employees, tour guides, unemployed youth, NGO organizers and workers from the USA, and Malaysians

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attending the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa conference. In the 1950–1960s many Indians went to Ethiopia as teachers, and now there were 500 Indian professors in the schools and universities (Thubauville and Amare 2020). Every Ethiopian I met had a chemistry teacher in school or a favorite lecturer at the university who was Indian, which led to a collective high regard for Indians. I was inserted into this register of collective regard and was welcomed to have conversations with them.

Textile and Garment Making for the Global Market The Ethiopian government had identified textile and garment as a key growth sector and planned to manufacture US $2.18  billion worth of production and earn US $779 million in export revenue, create 174,000 job opportunities, and reduce carbon emission by 25 percent by the end of 2020 (Ministry of Finance Ethiopia n.d.). This transformation professed the ideals of a developmental state that supposedly drew its image resembling the East Asian developmental states, perpetuating the story of the never-colonized Ethiopia that withstood the pressure to join the Washington Consensus. Clapham (2018) claims that, along with Rwanda, Ethiopia provides a critical example of the implementation of the idea of a “developmental state” in sub-Saharan Africa, beyond East Asia. Notwithstanding the façade of a strong African developmental state that rejected the Washington Consensus, Ethiopia was staunchly dependent on the USA for its economic transformation and Ethiopian labor was producing for American consumers. Much of Ethiopia’s industrialization plan was based on participation in Africa Growth Opportunity Act (AGOA), a United States Trade Act enacted in 2000, to provide the US market access to “qualifying” sub-Saharan African countries. AGOA helped the tariff-free entry of over 7000 products from Africa to the US market. To qualify and remain eligible for AGOA, each country was to work to follow western democratic standards, improve its rule of law, protect human rights, and respect core labor standards. The USAID was persuading the textile units to get a Worldwide Responsible Accredited Production (WRAP) certification,3 an Arlington-based agency that worked with the International Labor Organization (ILO). 3  The USAID persuaded the textile units to get a Worldwide Responsible Accredited Production (WRAP) certification, a US-based agency that worked with the International Labor Organization (ILO) to protect labor.

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Ethiopia has ratified all eight fundamental conventions by the ILO (India has ratified only six so far), including those on right to organize, collective bargaining, and minimum wage. Firms in the textile and garment sector tried to get accreditation to WRAP that ensured lawful and humane global manufacturing. Its 12 principles, based on generally accepted international workplace standards, reflected the language of relevant conventions of the ILO, as its website stated. The WRAP certification was a symbol of legitimacy in US eyes. In 2019, Ethiopia was one of the largest recipients of USAID in Africa (US $923 million) (USAID n.d.) to spend resources on meeting the millennium goals of eradicating poverty. The East African trade and investment hub of USAID, designed to assist African countries to take advantage of AGOA and other global trade initiatives, provided workshops detailing the benefits, procedures, and cost for obtaining WRAP certification. Thus AGOA, ILO, USAID, and WRAP seemed to provide the global market rubric under which production was to take place in Ethiopia. The most visible form of developmental help was from the Chinese state, the examples of which were abundant in the form of airports, stadiums, cars, roads, factories, restaurants, and tourist spots. The new roads in Addis Ababa now had Chinese-made Lifan cabs, replacing the old and rusty Lada cars introduced during the Mangistu-led Derg regime backed by the Soviet Union. The commute to Bishoftu has been simplified because of the Addis-Adama Expressway, the six-lane expressway built with Chinese technological and financial assistance. The expressway made the commute faster and “safer,” as emphasized by the driver of my taxi, Elemo: “Earlier, one was not sure one would reach the destination, given how bad the roads were.” Young Chinese entrepreneurs hung out with the locals in the lobby of the Ethiopian Investment Commission, tried injera and assorted dishes, listened to traditional music in restaurants, and drank coffee pressed from complicated Italian machines (remnants of Mussolini’s occupation from 1935 to 1943) in coffee shops. Students with whom I talked at the Ethiopian Civil Service University, my cab driver, and every other conversant, accused the Chinese of “looting” the economy. Nevertheless, nobody questioned the path of industrialization and economic growth for the transformation of Ethiopia, a country that has been eternally trapped in deprivation, rurality, misery, and famines that reflected a “backwardness” that was in urgent need of repair. This urgency was visible in Bishoftu too, where Aishanie was located.

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The New Delineations of Developmental Help The factory was unassumingly spread in an L-shaped building on the western side of equally unassuming Melo village, except for the golden dome of the church. The factory was painted in pale green and light yellow, as if it were done with the intention of not standing out in the array of the dusty green and yellow of the barley, teff fields, and sunflower patches that were ready for harvest. As a visual reminder of an Ethiopian-Indian partnership, the Ethiopian flag, with its pan-African colors, Indian, and Oromia flags were swaying along with the Aishanie flag at the gate, which was guarded by security men, recruited from the village, who saluted and checked the vehicles at each entry and exit. Aishanie Africa had chosen the lion as its symbol, potent in Ethiopia due to the historical connotations of the lion of Judah, which was the emblem of the Solomanic empire that ended in a coup in 1974. The faith in the empire has been revived recently, evident in the resurrection of the churches and the last emperor Haile Selassie’s legacies, displayed on the windscreens of cars and minivans. Aishanie was all set to be a flagship factory that would put Ethiopia on its path of development and growth, satisfying all the objectives underlined in the Growth and Transformation Plans and the green and labor standards required by the US brands. It was a “green” denim plant—the first of its kind in the world—a fact that was reiterated on the website, in the brochure, and in the interviews. I was given a tour of the factory’s waste management facility. The water treatment created no liquid waste, and the solid discharge was used as a by-product in the leather and cement industries. Aishanie’s electric boilers ran on Ethiopia’s clean hydro power with no pollution—the opposite extreme of the soot-covered satanic cotton mills that have captured our imaginations for a long time (Beckert 2014). The certificate from the Ethiopian Industry Development Institute, the government agency in charge of building the textile and garment industry, acknowledging the environmental contribution of Aishanie, was framed and placed in the room where the officials met customers and clients. The certificate praised the water treatment plant and Aishanie’s attempts to eliminate harmful substances into the environment in the Ethiopian budget year of 2008 (Gregorian year 2015). The factory also had the Oeko-Tex certification, an independent testing and certification system based in Zurich, which meant that Aishanie complied with regulations to eliminate harmful chemicals in production. Pran, the Quality Control Manager, had attended the training for WRAP certification, and

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he showed me their list of 12 principles, which was intensely highlighted in pencil and was carried in his everyday file of important things. Aishanie aimed at implementing the WRAP criteria in April 2019. The narratives of the executive staff of Aishanie reimagined the developmental help that I discussed earlier. They also portrayed the investments in Ethiopia as a benevolent act: benefitting Ethiopia just by being there, braving Ethiopia’s rough terrain, training the ill-equipped youngsters, and bearing with a nascent bureaucracy. Indians were well equipped to perform this braveness, not only due to the wealth of experience where these difficulties are dealt with routinely but also because of the endurance and perseverance of Indians, from the Gandhian era until now, that made India the “right” partner in taking Ethiopia through industrial modernization. India could impart lessons in development, culturally as well as technologically. A life-size painting of Mahatma Gandhi on Ethiopian handwoven textile mounted on the front wall welcomes the visitors to the non-descript office of Aishanie textiles. The painting was created in 2014 by one of Oromia’s finest artists, Lemma Guya. It showed Gandhi, in his humble dhoti tucked around his waist and white calico chappals, walking alone in a road in the middle of the Ethiopian grass and shrub fields framed by green mountains, a stick for support and an airmail envelope on the one hand, and a branch with what seemed to be coffee flowers that he plucked on his way on the other hand. The painting had an impact on me, since I had just watched the film Gandhi again on my flight to Ethiopia a few days prior. Perhaps, I thought, the painting is meant to remember Aishanie textiles in the context of the Gandhian spinning wheel. Later, I asked Pratul, the Chief Operating Officer who was dressed in a simple denim shirt and pants and shared his last name with Gandhi, why the painting was there. Was it because it was painted on denim textile, Ahmedabad being the hub of denim in India? Maybe the owners were from Gujarat, from the same community as Gandhi? He shrugged and replied that the owners are Marwaris from Kolkata and had nothing to do with Gandhi, though most Indian workers are from Ahmedabad. He added that the real patriotic leader was not Gandhi but Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel—“the iron man”—whose bronze statue, twice the length of Statue of Liberty, was to be unveiled by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the same month (October 2018). I raised the same question to Praveen, a Brahmin (who was eager to mention in the context of difficulties of following a vegetarian diet in

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Bishoftu) and an Indian trainer in the dyeing section, and he replied that the painting represents honesty, truth, and nonviolence, which meant a lot to him. Praveen came here after 15 years of work in the textile industry in Gujarat and was happy to talk to me in Hindi. Praveen admitted that he gets angry frequently because of the mistakes of the young workers he trains. “When I feel angry, I look at him (Gandhi). … He is asking everyone to move forward calmly.” He then went on to tell the story of how a woman once came to Gandhi, along with a child, pleading him to admonish the child against his addiction to jaggery (a type of sugar also known as gur). Gandhi asked the woman to come after three days, because he, himself, had to quit his gur addiction before talking to the child. These stories of honesty appealed to Praveen, and he even taught these stories to the Ethiopians who trained under him. Phanuel, the young Ethiopian supervisor who worked with Praveen, nodded and added that he knew that story about Gandhi. Phanuel joined Aishanie after a degree in textile engineering at Bahir Dar University, where he was taught by Indian lecturers, and he eased into the disciplining and training by Praveen. Praveen then said that he did not believe in Modiji, who is partisan and stands for violence. He respects Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. In an act of solidarity, and moved by his politics, I suggested that maybe he could show the Gandhi movie on a projector in the factory. The Ethiopian workers would understand it since it was in English. He liked the idea. The knowledge and recognition of Gandhi as an Indian figure that led a nonviolent anticolonial struggle meant a lot in colonial and postcolonial Africa. Recently, cleavages in this legacy have emerged due to Gandhi’s racism toward black South Africans and his attempts to carve an exclusive Indian identity, apart from native people as well as Indian indentured workers (Desai and Vahed 2015; see also Media Diversified 2019).4 Gandhi was venerated by Haile Selassie, the revived icon of African freedom and Ethiopian greatness, who said once, “Mahatma Gandhi will always be remembered as long as free men and those who love freedom and justice live” (Gandhi Asharam Sevagram n.d.). Gandhi, nevertheless, meant different things for different people in the factory. Pratul, an Indian entrepreneurial manager, practiced a nobleness and simplicity—and even a passive resistance that Gandhi represented—in his managerial practices, 4  There have been many recent incidents of racist attacks on African students in Delhi that have led to condemnation by African leaders and some soul searching within Indian intellectuals.

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but he did not side with Gandhi’s “weak” politics. Rather, Pratul favored the “iron man,” alluding to his consent to the growth-oriented right-wing government of Modi. For Praveen, a working-class man from Gujarat, Gandhi represented nonviolence, honesty, and truth. He believed these were good morals to discipline the workers under him and discipline himself. For Phanuel, the Ethiopian supervisor who studied with Indian teachers before, this association of Indians and Gandhi with teaching and learning was not strange, even in the context of factory work. Pratul came to the factory as the Chief Operating Officer after 39 years’ experience in the textile industry in Ahmedabad. He was there when the factory began functioning in 2015. He narrated the difficulties they faced setting up the factory in Bishoftu, and the triumph of teamwork and dedication: All the state-of-the-art machines in the plant were brought from India. Around 500 containers carried these machines from Djibouti port to Bishoftu. It was raining heavily, and the containers got stuck in the mud on the toll road. He, along with his team, stood knee deep in mud while digging out the container wheels. When the plant was inaugurated in 2015 October, the Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn came (photographs of the inauguration adorn the walls of the main conference room). He was excited to see the use of ATP technology in wastewater treatment, and he then introduced it in all industrial parks such as the much-famed Hawassa. Though the plant was operating below capacity due to the inconsistent availability of cotton and was making a loss, and the workers were not “productive” yet like their Indian counterparts, Pratul expected that full capacity would be a reality soon, with the new cotton sourcing and worker training strategies, and the expectations of prosperity would materialize. Ethiopia has ratified the two key ILO conventions that guarantee freedom of association and the rights to organize and bargain collectively. Yet, organizing in the garment and textile sector has been at the mercy of the management (Puddington 2010; Chiwota 2019). Pratul was proud that this was the first denim plant in Africa to have a Collective Agreement with the workers’ union, which was formed in 2018, after a prolonged discussion with the workers’ representatives. There were 900 employees in the plant, and the union represented the shop floor workers and the supervisors who were Ethiopian. The Collective Agreement was printed in English, Amharic, and Oromia languages with signatures from the management, workers, and witnesses. The Ethiopian Human Resource Manager told me that he would email me a copy of the Collective

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Agreement. I did not trust his words, but I received it a few days later. The 38-page document details the rights and obligations of workers, including medical leave, annual leave, wage agreement, bonus, promotion, and termination. All the shop floor workers were direct employees, and there were no temporary work arrangements. The employees were recruited according to job advertisements, and there were written contracts with all of them. Their monthly salaries (not daily wages) were deposited in the Ethiopian Development Bank, and Aishanie contributed 11 percent along with the 7 percent contribution from the employee to the pension fund. Along with that, the workers were given free injera and chickpea stew (without the meat due to the Marwari owner’s religious restrictions) in the factory-run canteen. They were also given free transport in buses to their homes, which was important to them during the night shift in rural areas. They were given safety masks and milk to drink if working with chemicals, and the health clinic inside helped them if there were work-­ related injuries. While the “developmental help,” which India was in a position to offer, placed Indian efforts on a higher plane in the developmental hierarchy of nations, often the management relied on similarities of the “third world condition” to interpret the difficulties of doing business. I witnessed 2 wild cat strikes during my visit, one by 20 garment unit workers and the other by transport workers. The union representative told me that these workers went on strike because the management did not comply with the Collective Agreement. The management told me that the first one was a demand for extending transport services up to the workers’ homes at night and the second one because the workers demanded payment in cash, rather than deposited in the bank. Manas, the Chief Executive Officer, visibly tense, was having a series of meetings in the conference room with the Human Resource staff and workers’ representatives during these strikes. Surprisingly, the other shop floor workers whom I conversed with seemed unaware of these strikes, which might indicate that they were isolated events that rarely extended beyond expressing a grievance. Manas, himself, disregarded the significance of these later by saying that such routine labor problems were common in India. The other “bottlenecks” of doing business in Ethiopia were also interpreted casually by the management. There were serious difficulties in sourcing cotton from the Southern regions of Ethiopia. The small farmers who cultivated them did not know to pack the cotton without impurities. I was shown the amount of poly fiber that was present in the cotton that

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was delivered to the factory. Farming was dependent on rainfall, and often production came to a halt because of a lack of available cotton. Moreover, there was no government regulation or procurement of cotton to support the industries. Brands such as H&M had stopped sourcing cotton from Omo valley due to stories of land grabs for cotton growing. Apart from that, the Ethiopian banks were sticklers regarding rules and did not accept little mistakes that caused constant delays. If the chemicals are stalled in port, then the plant is stopped. However, Pratul considered these problems “acceptable” because these bottlenecks have been faced in India as well, and they had to work together with a positive approach to reap the potential benefits of the European and US market.

Molding Industriousness on the Shop Floor In the spacious, clean, and fully automated factory, textiles were woven in amazing order and discipline. In the neatly divided units, raw cotton bales were cleaned, blended, churned, spun into yarns and threads, dyed into varying shades of denim, woven into fine and coarse cloth, rolled, and transported in trucks to Djibouti seaport or customers in Ethiopia. The machines were operated by young, agile Ethiopian women and men, dressed in T-shirts, denim jeans, and some wearing face masks. They were supervised by equally young Ethiopian men and women, fresh graduates out of textile engineering schools. In the small garment unit at one end of the factory, 104 workers, women mostly, stitched jeans with brand name Pete and Mufti under the supervision of Indian karigars5 (who were the only Muslims I met in Aishanie among both Indians and Ethiopians) from Lucknow and Benares. An Indian trainer playfully placed a pair of jeans on an Ethiopian woman’s shoulder. A few Ethiopian young men were ripping jeans looking at a design template. In the stitching room, the Ethiopian supervisor cheerily showed me the latest fashion in jeans. The Indian heads of the departments of spinning, dyeing, washing, and inspection, moved around the shop floor, stopped by me, and asked to visit their cubicles. The Indian trainers (such as Praveen) nodded at me in recognition of a fellow Indian, and we sometimes exchanged pleasantries. The Indian inspection department head proudly took me to watch how cloth defects, glossed over by the naked eye, were caught by his machine. In the weaving department cubicle, the young Ethiopian machine operator amazed me 5

 Indian clothing craftsmen.

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with her fluent colloquial Hindi, and her Indian boss smiled with fair admiration. The Indian managers and trainers were middle-aged men, while the employees were mostly young women (Table 7.1). These hierarchies of position, age, gender, race, and nationalities intersected with developmental kinship and divisions to create an atmosphere where the shop floor became a classroom. The workers became rather unruly children, and the Indians overseeing them  became fraternal figures imparting wisdom through education, not through coercion. The Indians wished away differences between the Indians and Ethiopians and resisted using the colonial codes, yet this discourse was not free from the colonial race discourse that involved gradations based on skin color (Stoler 2010). “Ethiopian women look like Indian women, if they are a little fairer,” said the manager of engineering to me, unperturbed that Esther, the supervisor, who was accompanying me could hear us. Ethiopians look “almost” like Indians; Ethiopia is not really in Africa, Ethiopia is an old civilization just like India, Ethiopians and Indians eat with hands, Indian dosa and idly are just like Ethiopian injera, “though not that sour,” were some of the other comments made by the Indians. Most Ethiopians in Bishoftu were orthodox Christians and took their religion seriously. They fasted two days a week, during which they avoided milk, which was one of the foods Hindus could have while they fasted. Ethiopian bars advertised posters of beautiful cows, sacred to Hindus, and hung cow carcasses to be cut up and eaten raw with beer, a phenomenon that would have been sacrilegious for the practicing upper-caste Hindus, which most of the managerial staff were. I met one or two Indians who were afraid of Table 7.1  The workforce in Aishanie Job

Nationality

Number

Top management Middle management Trainers Supervisors

Indian Indian (except HR) Indian Ethiopian

115

50–60 40–50 40–50 23–25

Office staff Shop floor workers

Ethiopian Ethiopian

252 580

23–25 19–21

75

Compiled based on data from Human Resource Department, Aishanie

Age

Sex Male Male Male Male 108 Female 7 Do not know Female 487 Male 123

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Ethiopian food (“their church asked them to eat raw beef and they get sick and many die very young,” as one of them told me). Yet, they sought harmony in the fact that the latter were religious and orthodox in their beliefs like Indians. This resonance in culture was reflected on the shop floor, where the Indians treated the workers as young siblings or children within whom they wanted to develop industriousness, thus scripting the story of India helping Ethiopia developmentally. The women were considered as girls in the family (sisters and often flirtatious cousins) and men as boys, both in need of assistance to learn to be diligent, a characteristic that the Indians had because of their experience in the textile industry (and development). The Ethiopians, especially the supervisorial staff that could foresee the rewards of an education and a disciplined work culture, were somewhat receptive to this fraternalism. The Indian managers suggested that the Ethiopian workers lacked a certain morality that was central to the workplace. The workers were idle and lazy and lacking in a sense of ownership and affinity (apnapan) to the workplace. “They learnt work fast, finished the task, and stayed idle.”6 In the small garment-making unit in the factory, the head complained that the workers often colluded in hiding the mistakes made while stitching jeans, which made losses for the company. The workers were not keen to come to work as well and often left work, and this high turnover rate affected production. Praveen compared this to his work in Ahmedabad. He said he was happy to work for the company; even when he was paid 500 rupees, he would spend that on food, snacks, and transport and was happy to come back and work. When he started in Arvind mills in Ahmedabad, he had to cycle for 13 kms and walk four bridges to reach work. Here, the workers had free shuttle and free food, and yet they were not interested in work. He had to explain to them that this experience was helping them: “New companies will come. Your salaries will increase.” During my first interview with the Aishanie CEO Manas, he said that the shop floor employees did not like being shouted at, and he was imploring the Indian bosses not to be aggressive, as was the custom in India (which was explicated by his own shouts and screams and threats of firing at the Indian staff). The heads of the various departments that I met told me the same thing—the Ethiopian workers did not like being shouted at. They attributed this to the lack of parental discipline and sometimes the 6

 Interview with the master of the garment shop, October 29, 2010.

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absence of colonization, as if somehow colonization made Indians submissive to shouting. Elsewhere I discussed how Vasudev, their boss, was visibly powerful over his workers with his age, nationality, position, gender, knowledge of chemicals, and experience, but his exercise of power, as the exercise of power all over the factory, was cautious, mellowed, and subdued. He could not shout at his employees nor discipline them as he said he had done in India. He could only treat their misdemeanors as “mischief” or shrug off their dilettantism as “kids.” Considering them to be kids was the way in which he could correct or chide them rather fraternally, while these mistakes were costly to the plant. Pratul Gandhi narrated how one night the bus taking the workers home broke down and a shard of glass hit a “girl.” The girls were upset but also were clamoring to get home. All the senior “team members” rushed to the scene and were with the “youngsters” for more than two hours. “They are like our daughters,” he said. But unlike Indian workers, they were complacent with no worries about the future, which was trouble for the factory’s production. “They have no fear, but no excitement too. … They are happy with just injera and shiro.” It was the Indian duty to ignite the spark of “industrial consciousness” in these young workers, and the factory had to bear with the “inefficiencies” to achieve this end. According to Pratul, “In India, one would need only 200 people to staff the plant, while here they have 800 people. This is understandable, since the idea is to bring young boys and girls from rural background[s] to the industrial environment, mold them to adapt to an industrial culture. We only need to ignite that spark at the right time and right place.”7 Pran, the Quality Control Manager, laid out a plan to prevent attrition and make the work force loyal by offering incentives, thus creating an “industrial culture” among them not by coercion but by contemporary managerial practice. In his own department of quality control, he celebrated everyone’s birthdays and announced the employee of the month. From the WRAP training, he learned of the efforts in Sri Lankan factories to provide incentives to workers beyond wages, such as opening beauty salons for garment workers. He suggested that since the Ethiopian women 7  This desire to mold industriousness among young women workers by the managers very much reminded me of the Indian context of young women workers and managers in a small-­ town business-process outsourcing (BPO) center in Bangalore described by Gowri Vijayakumar (Vijayakumar 2013). The genuine concern of the managers at Aishanie, just as those at the BPO center, to develop the work capabilities of women, points to an understanding of development and backwardness that is hierarchical, but not explicitly racialized.

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and men spent a lot of money, more than 100 birrs at a time on their hair (which was beyond his comprehension), a salon would work very well. Along with that, they could start a cooperative store selling products such as coconut oil from India and denim on employee discount. Alimayu, the supervisor in the dyeing section, was from Bishoftu and lived with his family—his father worked as a store supply manager in the air force base in Bishoftu and his mother was a preparatory school teacher. He was 23 and this was his third month working in Aishanie. He was a textile engineering graduate from Bahir Dar University, and his first job was in a Chinese textile firm as an apprentice. There, he had communication difficulties, the disciplining was too harsh, and he was “treated as a worker.” There was no training, and he was asked to operate the machine the first day by himself. He was glad to have moved to Aishanie, and his boss taught him like a “father.” All the knowledge about the dyeing process, the chemicals, and machines was new to him. He had studied with Indian lecturers in his university and felt that this was a continuation of his learning experience. Here, there was respect for Ethiopians, and he respected his boss as an elder. He earned a net salary of 3500 birr (US $102), and he could manage the costs of living since he lived with his family. There were 14 employees under Alimayu’s boss, 10 men including himself and 4 women. Alimayu was the interlocutor between them and his boss. Most of them were of the age 20–21, while one of them was just 18. A few of them studied part time and some failed in high school. Alimayu told me of his relationship with them: They are “half kids,” and difficult to manage, I must argue with them a lot, ask them again and again to do things. The communication between us is not good. Sometimes I must let their grievances be known to the HR and the CEO. They work with chemicals, and they demand milk as a compensation. They are my brothers [becomes a little emotional]. Their salary is very low, 900 to 1100 birr (26 to 32 USD). They get lunch and there is a nurse here. Most of them have farming plots, their little brothers work on them to harvest. Or they do [the] night shift and farm during the day. They ­complain a lot. But if the factory goes, they will be completely dependent on farming, which is rain dependent.

Alimayu considered himself a student of his boss/teacher, a continuation of his university education with Indian lecturers, and in turn considered

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his “unruly brothers” and “insolent sisters” as kids, though he, himself, was their age. He, as an educated youth, could figure out that this factory was a way out of poverty and subsistence farming for his young country men and women. They had no choice other than to be at work, even though their salary was insufficient to cover their basic expenses, let alone support their families. Alimayu and a data analyst in the cubicle were the interlocutors between me and those employees, who understood my English but could not reply fluently, which many interlocutors pointed out to me with a smile as a symptom of Ethiopian “backwardness.” Most of them were doing a part-­ time diploma or taking accounting classes at Rift Valley University in Bishoftu, which was subsidized by the government, but they still needed to pay student fees. Many were renting their living spaces in the town, though their salary did not cover that. Only a few had family farms where teff was harvested. Dressed in Aishanie T-shirts and their own denim jeans gone dirty and torn with the chemical washing in the dyeing process, they complained just a little about salary that did not cover the rent but complained more about not getting milk to offset the damage created by chemicals. But they told me repeatedly that their boss was good (Arrighi et al. 2010).8

Conclusion However hard scholars, business groups, or the Indian state might try to shroud it in the language of egalitarian partnership and solidarity, a big share of Indian investment in the African continent lies in extractive industries, just like the “Western exploiters.” In Ethiopia, textile making was embedded in the logics of the global market; the production was oriented toward exports to the USA and Europe and was predicated on the cheap labor and subsidies provided by the State. In Ethiopia, nevertheless, Aishanie was delivering the spinning wheel, training the locals in the textile craft, and helping the cotton growers. It was not a philanthropic mission, but neither was it a sweatshop or a satanic mill. 8  My three meals in modest restaurants and my taxi fare (slightly exaggerated on account of being a foreigner) from Addis Ababa to Bishoftu would cost me more than 1100 birr. Yet, the workers did not complain about the salary. They were young and probably did not have long-term expectations from this work. Their living expenses were subsidized by their families, often through earnings from their small farms, a process described clearly by Giovanni Arrighi.

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In the time I spent at Aishanie textiles, the interviews I did, and the interactions I saw, the Indians did believe in their ability (more so than Northern capitalist nations) to help Ethiopians because of the similar experiences of subjecthood as Third World citizens and having overcome the “bottlenecks” of inefficiency and incapability that accompanied that citizenship through education and entrepreneurship. The Indians had faith in their genuine kindness to impart these onto the others, and they believed that their civilizational similarities with Ethiopians, the legacy of Gandhi, and historical connections made them better partners than others, such as the Chinese state and capital. Many Ethiopians (and Indians) accepted this feeling of developmental backwardness enforced within the western-centric norms of modernity and progress. Educated Ethiopians, such as the supervisors, while proud of Ethiopian independence from colonial rule unlike India, still believed Ethiopia lacked modernity and development and trusted that Indians were educated enough to impart development. On the shop floor, the Indian middle-level managers attempted to mold industriousness among the young workforce and relied on fictive kinship with them, which also translated to upholding their racial and civilizational similarities rather than their differences. While Gillian Hart’s documentation of the relation between Taiwanese industrialists and South African women employees showed the inability and unwillingness of the former to use kinship and familial relations in their interactions, on the factory floor in Ethiopia that was very much in use. Indians were elder brothers because of their age and position, but also the experience of textile production in India, they were here to impart that knowledge to the young workforce. This was often willingly accepted by the Ethiopian supervisory staff who had Indian lecturers who helped them find the jobs, and they in turn wanted to help their younger brethren (and sisters) by imparting the training they learned. Yet, we must remind ourselves of the embeddedness of Afro-Asian solidarity generated by South-South flows in the spaces of power and hegemony that constitute global capitalism. The global aspirations of India were not determined by its own state policies or capital characteristics nor by the host institutions and society, but its embeddedness in the current historical context of neoliberal globalization is undoubtedly Northern-­ dominated. Indian textile manufacturing was not done in the spirit of a nationalist industrialization drive to make Ethiopia self-sufficient but to orient the Ethiopians to the transitory and elusive charms of the global

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market. The interactions that the factory and the shop floor generated often were mired in the contradictions above, such as paying below subsistence while giving time away for funerals, or providing lunch, milk, and pension funds with no guarantee of stable employment, while the young workers sustained themselves through their little brothers and sisters harvesting teff. In this chapter, I attempted to show that there were some visions and reimaginations of Afro-Asian solidarity within the constraints of the global market. One must be critical of the racism of developmental rhetoric and the absence of an alternative imaginary, other than capitalist manufacturing, to sustain societies and livelihoods. Yet one must also not fail to notice the possibilities of a new South-South imagination in the interactions between Indians and Ethiopians emerging from their shared marginality in the global developmental hierarchy of nations.

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Lynch, Caitrin. 2007. Juki Girls, Good Girls: Gender and Cultural Politics in Sri Lanka’s Global Garment Industry. Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press. MahatmaGandhiOrg. 1946. “Africa and India” in Harijan. February 24. Accessed May 30, 2020. https://www.mkgandhi.org/mynonviolence/chap73.htm. Martin, William G. 2008. Africa’s Futures: From North–South to East–South? Third World Quarterly 29 (2): 339–356. McCann, Gerard. 2019. Where Was the Afro in Afro-Asian Solidarity? Africa’s ‘Bandung Moment’ in 1950s Asia. Journal of World History 30 (1): 89–123. https://doi.org/10.1353/jwh.2019.0014. Media Diversified. 2019. Violence Towards Africans in India Has Roots in Anti-­ Blackness That Has Existed for Centuries. April 9. https://mediadiversified. org/2019/04/09/violence-­t owards-­a fricans-­i n-­i ndia-­h as-­r oots-­i n-­a nti­blackness-­that-­has-­existed-­for-­centuries/. Ministry of Finance Ethiopia. n.d. The Growth and Transformation Plan. Accessed December 24, 2018. http://www.mofed.gov.et/. Mohan, Giles. 2013. Beyond the Enclave: Towards a Critical Political Economy of China and Africa. Development and Change 44 (6): 1255–1272. https://doi. org/10.1111/dech.12061. Moraes, Frank. 1965. The Importance of Being Black: An Asian Look at Africa. New York: The Macmillan Company. Morvaridi, Behrooz, and Caroline Hughes. 2018. South–South Cooperation and Neoliberal Hegemony in a Post-aid World. Development and Change 49 (3): 867–892. https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12405. Nair, Manjusha. 2018. Delivering a Global India: Capital Flows and Development Dilemmas in South Africa’s Mining Zones. Economic and Political Weekly 53 (46): 52–59. Ong, Aihwa, and Carla Freeman. 2010. Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Prashad, Vijay. 2002. Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity. Boston: Beacon Press. Puddington, Arch, ed. 2010. The Global State of Workers’ Rights  – Ethiopia. Freedom House. Accessed November 19, 2020. https://freedomhouse.org/ sites/default/files/inline_images/WorkerRightsFULLBooklet-­FINAL.pdf. Ray, Raka, and Seemin Qayum. 2009. Cultures of Servitude: Modernity, Domesticity, and Class in India. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Stoler, Ann Laura. 2010. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv15d80x0. Sy, Amadou. 2015. Three Trends in Indo-African Trade and Investment. Brookings Blog. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/africa-­in-­focus/2015/10/23/three-­ trends-­in-­indo-­african-­trade-­and-­investment/.

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Thubauville, Sophia, and Hanna Getachew Amare. 2020. Migration of Indian Educators to Ethiopia: Between Solidarity and Global Capitalism. In Afrasian Transformations: Transregional Perspectives on Development Cooperation, Social Mobility, and Cultural Change, ed. Ruth Achenbach et al., 218–232. Leiden; Boston: Brill. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005. Friction: Ethnographies of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. USAID. n.d. U.S.  Foreign Aid by Country. Accessed June 1, 2021. https:// explorer.usaid.gov/cd/ETH. Vieira, Marco Antonio, and Chris Alden. 2011. India, Brazil, and South Africa (IBSA): South–South Cooperation and the Paradox of Regional Leadership. Global Governance 17 (4): 507–528. Vijayakumar, Gowri. 2013. ‘I’ll Be Like Water’ Gender, Class, and Flexible Aspirations at the Edge of India’s Knowledge Economy. Gender & Society 27 (6): 777–798. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243213499445. Wolf, Diane L. 1992. Factory Daughters: Gender, Household Dynamics, and Rural Industrialization in Java. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

CHAPTER 8

“Give In, Cut Your Hair … Or It Makes You a Very Strong Person”: Diasporic Sikhs, Transnational Racialization, and Embodied Identity Shruti Devgan

Sikh migrants were the earliest of all South Asian groups to arrive in North America, the first wave having immigrated in the early twentieth century. While Sikh immigrant experiences are similar to those of other South Asian religious communities, in that they all faced racialized exclusion and discrimination and were constructed as minority groups from their very first arrival, Sikhs (along with Muslims) constitute a religious minority even in their home country of India. National culture in the home country I would like to thank our wonderful editors, Smitha Radhakrishnan and Gowri Vijayakumar, for their insightful and rigorous comments and feedback. Many thanks also to my writing group: Oyman Basaran, Shenila Khoja-Moolji, and Jay Sosa.

S. Devgan (*) Department of Sociology, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Radhakrishnan, G. Vijayakumar (eds.), Sociology of South Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97030-7_8

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is significantly shaped by the culture of the dominant group, and, as Prema Kurien points out, “[m]ajority and minority groups usually have very different histories, political interests, and social concerns” (2018, 84). It is thus not only Sikhs’ minority status in North America but also in India that has shaped and reinforced the process through which they construct identity and community in the diaspora.1 In this chapter, I focus on Sikhs in the U.S. to argue that minority groups’ racialization, or the process of extending racial meaning to a previously unclassified group and “imparting social and symbolic meaning” to visible differences (Omi and Winant 2015, 111), is not limited to U.S. society. Instead, Sikh subjectivity as a racial “other” is in continuity with their experiences in India and is thus formed within transnational processes of racialized religious exclusion. In the Indian context, scholars have written about the racialization of religious differences, a line of thinking that demands further exploration (e.g., Pandey 1991; Jaffrelot 1995; Baber 2004; Puri 2016). I bring this scholarly work into conversation with the U.S.-centric theory of racial formation to argue that different forms of racialization in India and the U.S. converge to create a distinctive, transnationally constructed, Sikh embodied identity. An important aspect of Sikh embodied identity is visibility, expressed through articles of faith, especially kes, or hair, covered by the pagh, or turban. These symbols are gendered, with the pagh considered “the paramount signifier of male Sikh identity” (Kalra 2005, 75). Nevertheless, in the diaspora (but also increasingly in Punjab) Sikhs are renouncing kes and turbans (see, e.g., Mooney 2015). This is done for various reasons and is often a way to fit into mainstream society, especially when lacking the privilege of legal citizenship (Gill 2020, 20). Some men may even perform hybrid or context-specific embodied practices by donning or relinquishing the turban depending on the direction of their journey in the “circular” process of transnational travel (Gill 2020, 5). But there is a section of Sikh American men who continue to maintain religious insignia even when such symbols exaggerate the discrimination associated with their phenotype, particularly skin color, as structured by White2 supremacy. Focusing  Sikhs made up only about 1.7 percent of the total Indian population in 2011. The U.S. Census does not include a separate question on religious affiliation, but it is estimated that in 2012 there were 250,000 Sikhs in the U.S. http://www.pewresearch. org/2012/08/06/ask-the-expert-how-many-us-sikhs/. 2  https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/time-to-capitalize-blackandwhite/613159/?fbclid=IwAR3xuuCLoqMgtIA_wBbHs_2dnv_jcGGYyRIi7OxRWXbfK XWJ03OzdQlDL6I. 1

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on this segment of Sikhs, I ask why they perform embodied identity by adopting and maintaining the very symbols that mark them as “other” in both India and the U.S. Certain “critical events” (Das, 1995) intensify issues of racialization that minority groups grapple with on an everyday basis. For Sikh Americans, two such events represent key moments of racialization: the anti-Sikh violence of 1984 in India and the racial profiling and hate crimes following the 9/113 terrorist attacks in the U.S. Both events, albeit under different circumstances and perpetrators, compelled certain Sikhs to performatively reaffirm and reinterpret identity in and through religious insignia. Sikhs who embody religious identity are motivated not just by the meanings associated with the origin story of these symbols dating back to the seventeenth century, but also by the dynamic and ever-evolving relationship between individual subjectivity and the Sikh community. In embodying religious identity, Sikh Americans are constructing what I refer to as a transnational collective body. The Sikh collective body is corporeal and rooted in the materiality of religious symbols inscribed on the individual body, as much as it is imagined across space and time as the collective visceral experiences of a community with a long history of persecution and struggle. By adopting religious symbols, Sikh Americans perform and imagine the transnational collective body through an affective connection with the Sikh community at large—in India and the diaspora—while also forging genealogical ties with founders of the faith and familial ancestors. Though the Sikh collective body is constituted in and through individual corporealities and affects, it is sui generis, because it transcends individual practices and assumes meaning over and above them. Religious symbols hold significance for both women and men, but embodiment creates qualitatively different experiences: mostly men were seen as a threat and came under intense scrutiny from dominant groups in both 1984 and post-9/11. Thus, I focus on kesdhari (those who keep long hair and typically observe other symbols of faith) men’s hair and turbans, and the meanings they ascribe to these symbols. I draw on 12 3  Following conventional use, I refer to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in the U.S. as 9/11. However, the year is just as important as the date, because other significant events have also occurred on the same day; most notably the 1973 U.S.-backed coup in Chile, overthrowing the socialist president, Salvador Allende.

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semi-structured interviews I carried out in 2007–2008 (from a larger pool of 24) and eight interviews (from a larger pool of 27) that I did in 2012–2013 with visibly Sikh men aged 20–60 years. All respondents, with the exception of one from Canada, were in the U.S. To study the impact of 1984, I also draw on eight interviews from the oral history project, 1984livinghistory.org, that are tagged under the category “started to keep hair/kes.” As critical events, 1984 and 9/11 shaped a unique “‘historical-­ social’ consciousness” among different generational cohorts of Sikhs (Schuman and Scott 1989, 359). To study embodied identity during both these historical moments, I identify two main generational cohorts. The first cohort includes two groups for which 1984 was the defining moment in the shifting relationship with embodied practices. I describe these groups as the “first-generation,” who were already in the diaspora in 1984 and the “young second-generation,” children of immigrants born in the U.S. or who moved at a young age, ranging in age from seven to thirteen years old in 1984. The second cohort, which I describe as the “younger second-generation,” includes Sikhs born in or after 1984 and for whom 9/11 was most influential in shaping embodied identity. To interpret data, I arrived at key themes by coding and comparing interview data. In what follows, I show that intersecting national and transnational experiences—imagined and real, vicarious and direct—led certain segments of Sikh Americans to embody identity, simultaneously as a political act of resistance against the oppressive Indian State and White supremacy in the U.S. and as a way to belong to the transnational faith community through adopting the very symbols that mark them as the “other.” I start with a brief discussion of the religious symbols before moving on to a discussion of the transnational racialization of religion and early stages in the development of the Sikh diaspora. In later sections, I draw on my interview data to show how the Sikh diaspora’s relationship with India transformed after 1984 and how the events of 9/11 became the basis of doing boundary work with mainstream society. In both instances, a significant response that emerged from within the community was to embody identity by giving “new” meaning to articles of faith dating back to the seventeenth century.

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Same Symbols, Evolving Meanings The Sikh panth, or community, traces its genealogy to the Gurus, or teachers, extending from Guru Nanak (1469–1539) to the tenth and last Guru, Guru Gobind Singh (1675–1708), in Punjab. Guru Nanak founded a faith to resist the ritualism and dogmatism of Hinduism. Guru Gobind Singh founded the Khalsa4 in 1699 at Anandpur in Punjab to establish “a binding link between the community and the Guru, and among community members” (Murphy 2012, 56).5 For most of the nineteenth century Khalsa Sikhs constituted one of many groups in the diverse Sikh panth (Dhavan 2011, 21). Various developments in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries (see, e.g., Uberoi 1996), including the influence of British colonialism (explained below), led to the hegemony of the Khalsa identity, such that it became synonymous with being Sikh. Of the injunctions part of the Khalsa tradition are the panj kakké, or Five Ks, each beginning with the letter “k.” 1. Uncut hair—kes (along with uncut beard for men) covered by the under-turban or patka and the turban or the pagh (especially by men) 2. A comb worn in the hair—kangha 3. A steel bangle—kara 4. A ceremonial sword or dagger—kirpan 5. A pair of shorts, which must not reach below the knee—kachh Within the Khalsa, the kesdhari body has acquired hegemonic meaning and become a point of reference both in intra- and in inter-community relations (see, e.g., Barrier 2002, 741–742). Of the Five Ks, kes is considered “indispensable” (G.  Singh 2000, 39). Sikhs without kes may outnumber those with it, both in India and the diaspora, but those shorn of it are considered “‘fallen’ (patit)” (Mooney 2015, 103). The turban is not part of the Five Ks, but in its association with hair it has become a significant part of the embodied collective identity and even community honor (Singh and Tatla 2006, 127). The Five Ks are interpreted in different ways, both within and outside the community (Murphy 2012, 61–62), and these interpretations emerge  The term khalsa, from the Arabic word khalis, literally means “pure.”  Guru Gobind Singh, the final embodied Guru, established that the Guru was present wherever a congregation gathered. A related principle was that the Guru was present in the sacred scripture, the Guru Granth. 4 5

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in a dynamic relationship with social conditions, particularly engagement with out-groups. In the early years of the establishment of the faith, one significant way to understand the construction of these symbols (conferred during initiation rites) was in opposition to the Hindu Sanyasi/Jogi traditions (renunciation) prevalent in Guru Gobind Singh’s time (Uberoi 1996). For example, in one kind of Sanyasi/Jogi tradition, the initiates practice anti-depilation and let hair grow long, matted and unkempt, which in turn symbolizes renunciation. This is inverted in the Sikh code. It is taboo to cut one’s hair, but at the same time the comb is a crucial accompaniment in making sure it is kept clean and orderly.6 Thus, even at the inception of Sikhism, these symbols emerged as a form of resistance to established traditions. As I show in this chapter, in the contemporary period, critical events of 1984 and 9/11 provided external conditions where Sikh Americans drew on existing interpretations associated with symbols of the faith but also created “new” context-specific meanings for “old” signifiers to perform embodied identity. These religious symbols were then interpreted in different ways, and though their meanings were tied to the origin story of the Khalsa, they were also always evolving. In fact, as recent scholarship suggests, these symbols emerged as a set only gradually (Dhavan 2011; Murphy 2012). Embodied identity acquires meaning in and through these symbols, but the meanings associated with them are not inert and static. Instead, symbols assume different meanings in different times and contexts. The cultural repertoire that Sikhs draw upon is not fixed but made malleable by individuals who make meaning depending on exclusionary structural conditions—both national and transnational. In the following sections of the chapter, I show how Sikh Americans who had renounced their kes started growing it again in response to real and imagined racialized violence and discrimination, creating an embodied transnational collective body.

Transnational Racialization of Religion In the U.S., racialization has a strong “visual dimension,” which entails ascribing “social and symbolic meaning to perceived phenotypical differences,” (Omi and Winant 2015, 111, emphasis in original) including traits such as skin color, facial features, and hair texture. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 led to an increased racialization of religious identities, where White 6

 Uberoi offers a similar semiological analysis of the other three Ks (1996, 12–13).

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supremacists marked Brown skin and conspicuous religious signifiers, such as the turban and hijab, with “other-ness” and made them a “proxy for race” (Joshi 2006, 218). Racialization then conflates race and religion. But it also collapses differences within divergent religious groups—in the case of South Asian Americans, Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus—to create an essential identity and “render[s] them theologically, morally and socially illegitimate” (Joshi 2006, 212). In India, however, fault lines are created between these religious groups, especially between the dominant Hindu race/nation and Muslims. Yet in the 1980s and 1990s the State manufactured Sikhs as “the enemy.” Sociologists studying first and second-generation South Asian Americans, particularly Prema Kurien (e.g., 2001, 2018) and Bandana Puryakastha (2005), have challenged Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s influential racial formation framework on two main counts: First, it limits the process of racialization to within the U.S., and second, it neglects religion as an important site for constructing transnational identity. Kurien has offered significant insight into the intersection between religious minority status and discrimination in both the home and host country that creates a dynamic process of racial-ethnic classification. In contrast, Puryakastha has provided a nuanced account of multiple, layered, and shifting account of racialized ethnicity in a transnational “field,” where children of middle-class South Asian immigrants negotiate various boundaries—race and culture within the mainstream, race, religion, gender, and nationality within their families and communities, and immigration restrictions within transnational spaces—to actively construct ethnicity. However, both Kurien and Puryakastha’s definition and scope of racialization remains U.S.-centric. Writing about Sikh Americans, Kurien shows how it is not just race-based discrimination in the U.S. but also “traumatic events in the homeland … [that] can lead to ethnic solidarity and mobilization” (2018, 84). Yet, she does not consider how religion gets racialized even in India. Puryakastha similarly suggests that transnational connections are a “reaction to racialized boundaries [in the U.S.] … to mitigate the effects of racialization” (2005, 11). Here, I extend Kurien and Puryakastha’s work to consider theories of racialized religious differences in India. In India, the term “communalism” is typically used to define religion-­ based, mutual tensions and hostilities. It is precisely this idea of reciprocity underlying communalism (Puri 2016, 75) that fails to provide an adequate explanation for Sikhs being targeted by members of the dominant religious community. Still, race and racialization are dismissed as processes

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driving religion-based stratification in India, the rationale being the lack of phenotypic difference between religious groups. To the extent that the hallmark of race is to divide groups by essentializing and naturalizing differences between them, often (though not always) using biology as an alibi for what are in fact “cultural and historical regimes of classification” (Puri 2016, 86), the framework is applicable to the Indian context. At least two simultaneous developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had the effect of constructing divisions in Indian society that are best analyzed through the lens of race and racialization. Firstly, British colonial authorities legitimized and concretized hitherto fluid distinctions between groups based on their own “cultural beliefs in biological determinism and in the physical inheritance of cultural traits” (Fox 1985, 149). The British created the Sikhs, Gurkhas, Punjab Muslims, and others as “martial races” (Fox 1985, 141), ascribing certain groups with “inherent” martial skills that were especially suited for military recruitment. The British not only categorized Sikhs as a “martial race” to draw strict boundaries between Sikhs and Hindus, but they also required all Sikhs to undergo baptism and a strict observance of Khalsa customs and ceremonies. Thus, “a strange syncretism of British military form and Singh ritual symbolism” (Fox 1985, 142) underlies the construction of a homogeneous (racialized) Sikh identity. At the same time, the idea of Hindus constituting a “natural” united “race” (“community,” “people,” and “nation” are also used) that were the “natural inhabitants” of Hindustan (India), and concerns over their decline became pronounced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, expounded in the racial theories of Hindu nationalist ideologues (Pandey 1991; Jaffrelot 1995; Baber 2004). Unlike European ideas, the biological component was absent in the Hindu nationalist racial theory but offset by the construction of a more durable form of racism: an “ethnic nation” where the “other” must adopt various aspects of Hindu culture. Here, racialization entailed absorbing non-Hindus into the Hindu Rashtra, or nation (Jaffrelot 1995, 339–345). Based on this idea, Hindu nationalist ideologues maintained that Muslims and other non-Hindus could be “‘Naturalized’ in the country by being assimilated in the Nation wholly” (M.S. Golwalkar as cited in Jaffrelot 1995, 345). This approach rested on “a racism of domination rather than a racism of extermination”

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(Jaffrelot 1995, 344).7 In the Sikh case, this racialization by assimilation has manifested itself at various historical moments. For instance, Hindu nationalists unproblematically categorized Sikhs as “fighters for Hindu freedom, in spite of the long and successful Sikh struggle from the last decades of the nineteenth century onwards … to establish a Sikh identity distinct from that of Hindus” (Pandey 1991, 2998). In 1984 and the period that followed, the Indian State assumed a Hindu identity while racializing Sikhs, constructing them as an undifferentiated “other,” though arguably moving from a more “assimilationist approach towards the Sikhs to a confrontational or even selective [annihilatory] approach” (P. Singh 2005, 924). Even though Hindus and Sikhs in India do not recognize phenotypic differences, racialization still has a visual dimension. A “fragment” of the male body, the head, and the face—turbaned and bearded—“facilitate[s] the identification of the individual with the collectivity” (Axel 2001, 132). Both in 1984 and post 9/11, in India and the U.S. respectively, racialization entailed conflating the body of the individual Sikh with the stereotypical, essentialized body of the group as “terrorist” and imbuing them with an “antinational perversity” (Axel 2001, 137). As Sara Ahmed explains, racial hatred does not simply “reside” in a given subject; instead, it circulates between different subjects and bodies, collating a diverse group into a “common threat” (2004, 44). The racialized religious exclusion of the body fragment both in India and in the U.S. converged to create a distinctive Sikh subjectivity in the diaspora. “Embodied Sikh” became a “master identity,” or the most salient identity in a hierarchy of multiple identities (Stryker and Serpe 1982). The segment of Sikhs I studied is coping with transnational racialization by performing embodied identity as a political act of resistance, as a way to revive their connection with the faith community, as a mode of self-reflection and introspection, and as an affective response.

Migration, Exclusion, and Transnational Solidarity To understand evolving meanings of religious symbols in the context of transnational racialization, it is important to briefly recall early transnational linkages. As Sikhs, along with other Asian migrants, started arriving 7  Under the present right-wing regime in India, the exclusion of Muslims has morphed from a racism of domination to extermination (Rustom Bharucha as cited in Puri 2016, 84).

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mostly on the West Coast of the U.S., anti-Asian sentiment began to take root. In response to the presence of Indians/Sikhs, as well as Chinese and Japanese immigrants, a series of Asian Exclusion Acts began to be instituted, prohibiting their entry into the U.S. These legal measures were accompanied by patterns of physical violence, economic-political marginalization, and social segregation. The media, federal and state agencies “theologically conflated” (Joshi 2006, 219) and denigrated all South Asian immigrants—a majority of whom were Sikhs but also included Muslims—by labeling them Hindus or “Hindoos” (Jensen 1988; Takaki 1989). While “‘Hindu’ served as a racial appellation” (Ian Haney-López as cited in Joshi 2006, 219) for all South Asians, perhaps the most important visible marker of exclusion was the turban, evident in the derogatory language of “tide of turbans” and epithets like “ragheads” (Jensen 1988; Takaki 1989). While certain scholarly accounts such as Joan Jensen’s (1988) point out that Sikhs maintained religious symbols in these early phases, others like Bruce La Brack note that Sikhs did not strictly observe symbols of the faith from their first arrival until nearly the late 1950s (as cited in Lal 1996, 67). There is sufficient evidence, however, that Sikhs continued to identify with India and work in solidarity with non-Sikhs at this stage, seen most vividly through the Ghadar movement. In the early 1900s, anticolonial leaders began drawing connections between the discrimination that Indians were facing in North America and with their colonial status in India, forming the transnational, anticolonial Ghadar movement. The party consisted of mostly Sikh, but also non-Sikh Punjabi migrants from various backgrounds, who came together to bring about violent revolutionary change in India and carve a niche for themselves in their new diasporic locations. Though the Ghadar movement fell short of achieving their revolutionary goal, it was an early manifestation of a strong, inclusive, transnational mobilization supporting India. The movement showed that when it came to political organizing, identity as “Indian” rather than Sikh, Hindu, or Muslim was most important (see, e.g., Sohi 2014). Yet, hitherto muted racialized tensions between Sikhs and Hindus became manifest and solidified in 1984 not just in India but reverberated transnationally. For transnational Sikhs, their distance and even disembodiment from the Sikh collective body in the national context merged with their racialized subject position in the U.S. to imagine and vicariously feel the suffering that the Hindu nation/race inflicted upon them.

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1984 and Embodied Identity Though 1984 saw an organized attack on Sikhs, the estrangement between Sikhs and the Indian State that led up to the 1984 violence started evolving in the 1940s. In 1947, India achieved independence from British colonial rule, but this was accompanied by the Partition. Punjab in the northwest and West Bengal in the east were split between the two new nation-states that emerged at this time: Hindu-dominant India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. Sikhs suffered the death, destruction, sexual violence, and homelessness marking this period, but they also suffered because their demand for a separate Sikh state went unheard. As British colonial rulers planned a hasty exit, Sikhs opposed the formation of Pakistan and demanded an independent state for Sikhs, a demand that was quickly dismissed (Khushwant Singh 1966, 258). Eventually, the Boundary Commission assigned 62 percent of the total area of Punjab to Pakistan. Khushwant Singh observed that while this arrangement was mostly fair to Muslims and Hindus, “[t]he one community to which no boundary award could have done justice without doing injustice to the others were Sikhs. Their richest lands, over 150 historical shrines, and half of their population were left on the Pakistan side of the dividing line” (1966, 278). Sikhs found themselves in a subordinate position in post-independence India. Their demand for a separate electorate, and the special status they had been promised was rejected. Further, the racial assimilationist approach of the Hindu Rashtra can be seen in Article 25 of the Indian Constitution, where the definition of Hindu includes Sikhs (along with Jains and Buddhists) (P. Singh 2005, 916). Such Hindu majoritarianism kept intensifying anxiety about Sikh identity, culminating in the 1970s and 1980s.8 The various political machinations and maneuverings between the federal government, the Sikh regional party (the Akali Dal), and the controversial Sikh leader Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, as well as an escalation of violence by Bhindranwale’s followers and other Sikh extremist groups created an atmosphere of distrust and animosity against the Sikh community at large. In 1983, Bhindranwale and his followers took refuge in the Golden Temple, the “theo-political” center of Sikhs (Kapur Singh 1984). This term evokes the principle of non-duality in Sikhism, as religion and politics co-exist in ideas such as saint/soldier (sant-sipahi), and spiritual/ temporal (miri-piri) (Bhogal 2011, 60) rather than an either/or  For a description of developments during the period, see, for example, Brass (1974).

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association. Thus, the Golden Temple is best described as both the theological and political center of Sikhs. Given that this sacred complex lies at the “center of [the Sikh] moral and religious world” (Chopra 2011, 18), it has acquired an anthropomorphized quality. Thus, in June 1984 when the Indian army—under the leadership of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi—invaded the shrine using the pretext of “flushing out the extremists” and killing thousands of pilgrims, the attack was mourned for the death of people but also for the “desecration” and “hurt” inflicted on the Golden Temple, which embodied the sangat or collective body of the community (Chopra 2011, 18). Following closely on the heels of this attack, Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards on October 31, 1984. The assassination precipitated the organized, State-backed massacre of Sikhs in India’s capital city, New Delhi, and other parts of North India. The massacre lasted from the evening of October 31 through November 4, with more than 3000 Sikhs murdered. The events of 1984 initiated at least a decade of State-sanctioned killings, disappearances, and torture in Punjab (see, e.g., Tully and Jacob 1985; Nayar and Singh 1985). I use “1984” as shorthand to symbolize the violence of June and November but also for the period that followed. While the Ghadar movement illustrates the strong transnational mobilization supporting India, the events of 1984 became a temporal marker for when the community’s relationship with India started changing. Sikh and Indian were becoming mutually exclusive and separate, rather than intersecting identities. At the same time, Sikhs continued to experience racial and xenophobic violence in the U.S. For instance, job conventions have equated the turban to a hat and required Sikh men to remove it for several jobs, prevailing laws view the kirpan, or ceremonial sword, as a weapon not permissible in schools or during air travel, the desecration of gurdwaras or Sikh places of worship (along with Islamic mosques and Hindu temples) through tactics ranging from defecation to arson, and the verbal harassment Sikhs suffer for looking “different” (Puar 2007; Lal 1996). In the immediate aftermath of the events of 1984, Sikhs in the diaspora were visibly moved to action, with protests against the Indian State.9 This was accompanied by a shift in individual and collective Sikh embodied 9  This was not the only response to the events of 1984. While the community as a whole suffered the hurt and humiliation of the attacks, not all Sikhs expressed their outrage by participating in protests or embodying identity.

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identity. Adopting all or some of the Five Ks, particularly kes, was an important way to enact identity, symbolic of resistance against the Indian State. Being a kesdhari Sikh became a master identity, which included adopting corporeal and visual symbols of the faith and subsuming all other ways of performing embodied identity. This was done in a bid to transcend and negate affiliation with what came to be perceived as the Hindu, more precisely Brahminical, Indian nation-state. In 1984, for first-­ generation and young second-generation Sikhs who started learning about the events at home and in community settings, like gurdwaras, the events led them to reclaim their religious-cultural identity that they had been gradually renouncing as they assimilated into North American immigrant contexts. At the epicenter of the violence in India, many Sikh men were being forced to cut their hair and make themselves less conspicuous. But in a remarkable display of transnational connection and solidarity, it was diasporic Sikhs who answered back to the racialized conflation between bodies of individual Sikhs and the collective body of Sikhs as “terrorists” in India by performing community in and through corporeality. In the process, they made themselves more vulnerable to increased racialization in the U.S. but also ended up challenging the assimilationist ethos. Even though Sikhs in India directly experienced the events of 1984, the trauma resonated with Sikhs across the world. Veer was 18 years old in 1984 (48 years old at the time of the interview) living in San Jose, where he continues to live at present. While Sikh community members in India suffered the violence and experienced the loss of community ties (Erikson 1995), in San Jose another effect of the trauma was emerging. In Veer’s words: We saw the news in the San Jose Mercury News. I felt a deep sadness come over me that the Sikhs’ holiest place was attacked by the Indian army … what the local community here used to do was to get together and do ardasaan (prayers) and keertan (sing hymns)—apni qaum di chardhi kalan waasté—to keep our people in high spirits … Jedé udon Sikh parvaran ne kes kataye si, o kes rakhan lag gaye … kyunki o Sikhi de naal judna chaunde si—at the same the Sikh families who had cut their hair, they started keeping it, because they wanted to attach themselves with Sikhi (Sikh theology).10

10  I include a mixture of languages—quoting respondents verbatim in Punjabi and corresponding English translation—as a way to highlight the cultural specificity of certain terms and phrases and the inadequacy but necessity of translation.

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As the tragedy unfolded in India, San Jose Sikhs started coming together as a group to introspect and derive meaning from community traditions of ardaas and keertan. In the face of vicariously felt trauma, Sikh families who had renounced religious symbols re-adopted them, specifically kes. In one sense, diasporic Sikhs were disembodied from the collective body of Sikhs in India. Yet, this very disembodiment fostered solidarity among them, and a section of Sikhs started making a commitment to the collective body of the community by inscribing it on their individual bodies. One of the early foundational principles of Sikhism is that the Guru’s sacred presence is found wherever the Sikh congregation, or sangat, gathers. In other words, the Guru was present in the “corporate body of the community” (Oberoi 1987, 34). Sikhs in the diaspora extend this principle to construct a transnational “imagined community” (Anderson 2006 [1983]). So even though diasporic Sikhs were physically distant from the violence of 1984 and did not experience it first hand, they were injured by the loss of the community that “serves as the repository for binding traditions” (Erikson 1995, 188), leading them to perform identity by making visible the very attributes that stigmatized them in immigrant contexts. Amaan’s11 story conveys this trauma experienced by community members. Born and raised in New York, 34-year-old Amaan is a young second-­ generation Sikh. He attributes the events of 1984—more than the attack on the Sikh people in the aftermath of 9/11—as being responsible for maintaining religious insignia. I was both moved and puzzled by his explanation. Even though he was born and grew up in New  York, in close proximity to the site of the terror attacks, he was emphatic that his commitment to the visible articles of faith was because of the violence of 1984. There are several important themes that emerge in Amaan’s narrative: I remember when we were little and we would identify as Indian, we would write Indian really slowly and really carefully, so proud to be Indian, then all of a sudden overnight it changed. … The reason I have my [visible] identity today … I probably would have cut it [hair] off, the reason I have it is what happened in ‘84, that had a profound impact on me more than even 9/11 … and I don’t know, can’t understand why [be]cause I spend my whole life here. I wake up every morning and see the Twin Towers and it’s something that you would think would move me a lot more, something that I see concretely every day, but what happened in ‘84 was that—I really can’t describe it. Here’s the thing, I’m not fanatic or anything, what happened in Amritsar  I gave my interviewees pseudonyms.

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[city housing the Golden Temple], I mean the closest I would call it is like a trauma one has when one is raped or violated you never thought would happen. All of a sudden, I remember before ‘84 we took this identity for granted, a lot of my friends had their hair cut … after ‘84 they started keeping it again. The Khalsa identity got … reasserted, when you feel threatened you tend to get insulated … and I was at a very impressionable age … so all of a sudden the identity took on a whole new form. It’s not just a religious identity, but it’s almost like a defiance; this is who I am and you can’t destroy it. … The attack on the Darbar Sahib [Golden Temple] was seen not as an attack on terrorists but an attack on the spirit of the people. That’s how Sikhs saw it … today’s generation might be different and it may not affect them as much, but for our generation, it was really a defining moment. (Emphasis added)

In accounting for his embodied identity, Amaan conveys the deep intensity with which he “experienced” the “rape” and “violat[ion]” following the violence of 1984, even though his family members and friends had not suffered directly. One explanation for why Amaan felt the hurt of 1984 more than 9/11 might have to do with the fact that it was his (and his generation’s) first encounter with direct and explicit violence against the community. The year 1984 constituted the critical event that first brought such violent “othering” into Amaan’s generational consciousness. Violence following 9/11 was a reinforcement and reminder, rather than emergence of this consciousness. Jis tann läge soee jãne is a Punjabi maxim that roughly translates into “only those whose bodies have suffered the pain, can know its intensity.” The tann, or body, that the proverb refers to is the overlapping, real, and imagined individual and collective Sikh body, but also the “body” of the anthropomorphized Golden Temple. Thus in 1984, Sikhs “felt the destruction of [the Golden Temple] as a humiliation inflicted upon the [body of the] panth” (Dusenbery 1990, 251). When men in India were killed in 1984, their bodies burnt alive, their kes shorn, and renouncing their turbans out of fear, they directly experienced the suffering. It was vicariously internalized by women in India, but it also impacted Sikhs in the diaspora. In adopting kes, young second-generation Sikhs were likely drawing on their own experiences of being the racialized religious “other” in the U.S. to imagine a similar hatred targeted against community members in India, and performatively reclaiming and restoring the izzat (honor) of the collective body of Sikhs.

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In most South Asian communities, including Sikh, women embody ethnic culture and are required to serve as guardians of the “symbolic boundaries of communities” (Yuval-Davis 1999). But while within the Sikh community, women are repositories of izzat (Das 1976, 15), in interactions with non-Sikhs, men’s kes and turban are “by default the more public symbols of Sikh hair practice” (Mooney 2015, 114, emphasis added). The turban signals honor and strength. However, a symbol that confers privilege within the community, assumes a vastly different meaning in interactions with non-Sikhs. In addition to conventional ideas of gendered violence, where women’s bodies become sites for inscribing difference, in the Sikh case the male kesdhari body “is always already circumscribed as a dangerous terrorist lookalike or aspirant terrorist” (Puar 2007, 183). Amaan was eleven years old in 1984 and coming of age in the period of attacks on Sikhs in India had an impact on him, proving to be a rite of passage. As we saw earlier, Amaan juxtaposed his deep feeling of estrangement from the Indian State with the pride and sense of belonging he felt about being “Indian” before 1984. At this time, “[b]eing a Sikh, a Punjabi and an Indian posed no contradiction” (Tatla 2012, 67). Amaan’s unified Indian-Sikh subjectivity split in 1984, the “Hindu racial state” taking precedence over “India.” Amaan’s subjectivity is also a product of the “diasporic imaginary,” where the homeland is not just about a place or location, but instead it is a “temporalizing and affective aspect of subjectification” (Axel 2002, 426). Amaan’s Sikh identity, separate from his Indian identity, is constructed in and through the circulation of affects and corporealities that create the collective Sikh body. In turn, he constructs the latter by enacting visible identity. Khushwant is another young second-generation Sikh profoundly impacted by events of 1984. Born and raised in Canada, he remembers being seven or eight when he first found out about the attack on the Golden Temple. He remembers going to the gurdwara as a child, having grown up with photographs of the sacred complex in his house, and he described the shrine as the “heart of the Sikhs.” His reference to “heart” evokes the intimate connection between the material embodiment of Sikh traditions and affective attachment to this corporeal structure. Khushwant recalls being with his family when phone calls started coming in with news of the Golden Temple’s invasion. His story was evocative of how the loss suffered by the community was felt very personally.

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I sensed, in retrospect in looking at it, I can see how quickly the pain, the absolute shock—it was almost like losing a loved one in the family … the anger and the rage and the absolute frustration and how in the communities in Canada, you know up until 1984, Sikhs in North America were very secularized. There were very—there were practicing Sikhs, non-practicing Sikhs … and instantly I remember that had changed. You found people who … called themselves Sikhs but had never really practiced the faith, all of a sudden the orange dastaars (turbans) came out … it was the wake-up call.

Like Amaan’s narrative above, Khushwant’s account illustrates the realization among members of the community that the idea of Sikh and Indian as overlapping identities was, in fact, a delusion. For Sikhs in the diaspora, religious identity was fading into the background before 1984, and they were becoming increasingly “secularized.” 1984 compelled at least a section of Sikhs to reevaluate their relationship with India and draw stricter boundaries12 around what started being perceived as the Hindu State and, as a corollary, to reflect on their relationship with the Sikh community. External assault by the Indian State evinced strong feelings of belonging and identification with the faith. In 1984, then, wearing long hair and a turban signified many things at once: It was a political act challenging and resisting the oppression of the racialized Indian State, a revival of the waning relationship with the Guru, manifest in the physically co-present as well as the imagined community, forging an affective attachment with material tradition, and a salve of sorts for the wounded collective body. But the Sikh community is constructed as a minority community not just in India but also in the diaspora. The context and actors they are engaged with are different, but they are still constructed as the racialized “other,” disinvesting them of a sense of belonging and home. At least some Sikhs continue to find a place for themselves not by rejecting their religious markers but by embracing them—creating new meaning in and through embodied identity.

12  This does not imply that this was the first time that Sikhs were drawing boundaries with India, hence the use of the comparative adjective, stricter. Boundaries between Hindus, Sikhs, and other communities are always in a process of flux.

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9/11 and Embodied Identity While 1984 became a temporal marker for Sikhs to reevaluate their transnational ties with India, the violence following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 forced them to reckon with the marginalization and stigmatization that has lurked under the surface since their very first arrival on North American soil. Depending on external conditions, this marginalization ebbs and flows. While Sikhs had not been exempt from xenophobia and discrimination before 9/11, this event proved to be a decisive shift in the Sikh community’s position in U.S. society. Sikhs—along with other South Asians, Muslims, and Arabs, or any other group resembling these communities—became targets of backlash against the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the rising tide of Islamophobia. This was not a new phenomenon, as seen above in the discussion of the use of Hindu as a racial appellation, but it reasserted itself with renewed force at this time. White supremacists were targeting all Brown bodies, conflating a diverse group of people— each with a distinct ancestry, national origins, ethnicity, and religion— as Muslim. Sikhs experienced harassment, detention, violence, denial into public places, employment discrimination, and racial profiling immediately after the terrorist attacks (Sidhu and Gohil 2008, 20–36). The civil rights organization, the Sikh Coalition, reports twenty-two cases of bias incidents against Sikhs on the very same day as the attacks, 9/11. The “first murder victim of the 9/11-related hate crime backlash” was a turbaned Sikh, Balbir Singh Sodhi in Mesa, Arizona on September 15, 2001 (Sidhu and Gohil 2008, 23). Like 1984, which created a renewed consciousness of being Sikh, racial profiling, surveillance, and violence following 9/11 became an impetus— especially for a group of younger second-generation Sikhs—to do boundary work and find refuge and solace in their faith. Embodied identity is the most visible manifestation of this work. One of the responses to emerge from within the Sikh diaspora to the xenophobia following the attacks of 9/11 was to claim the very “other-ness” that was imposed on them by White supremacists. Instead of renouncing religious insignia, a group of Sikh men started keeping kes and wearing the turban.13 Scholar and 13  Like in 1984, this was not the only response from within the community in the face of increased discrimination. Sikh men faced internal dilemmas and conflict, for example, feelings of “being a possible sellout,” and “maybe I’m not as strong a Sikh as I thought I was” (Arora 2013, 118).

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activist Jaideep Singh explains that “Apparently Muslim,” although not officially recognized, has emerged as a new categorical identity and basis of inequality. “[T]he visible markers which distinguished the victims of post-9/11 hate crimes were not solely or even primarily racial, but actually religious signifiers … these religious symbols became racialized indicators” (J. Singh 2013, 123, emphasis in original). Embodied identity became a “declared” (Peek 2005, 230) or publicly acknowledged identity, precisely in response to the racialization of religion. Kirat is a 20-year-old second-generation Sikh who attributes his embodied identity, and the “sense of purpose” younger cohorts find in this identity, to withstanding experiences of being the “other” in the diaspora. As he was growing up, he recalls being made aware of his differences as a Sikh, not only because of distinctive religious practices but also because of the visible insignia that he wore. In the diaspora, Sikhs are confronted with episodes of racial profiling, such as bullying in school, what Kirat summed up as “dealing with adversity.” I guess Sikhs [in India] are a little bit different but … people know who they are; every day here [U.S.] … you grow up with people asking about who you are, why you are the way you are? You grew up in the post-9/11 world where you look like the very enemy America was fighting, you know, and what that does is that it either makes you give in, you either cut your hair and assimilate or it makes you a very strong person, it makes you question your beliefs, it makes you insecure temporarily, but then you go find those answers. You go find that logic behind it and the reasoning behind it, and then it makes sense. (Emphasis added)

Kirat performs embodied identity because of, not despite, being constantly questioned and challenged by members of the majority White group, especially after the events of 9/11. The importance of generational consciousness comes forth in Kirat’s use of White supremacy as a reference point for enacting embodied identity. In contrast to Amaan, for whom his embodied identity was a product of transnational racialization, the violence inflicted by the Indian/Hindu State first ignited his awareness of being “the stranger,” for Kirat, growing up in a post-9/11 world meant justifying and rationalizing his “strangeness” in relation to Whiteness. He talks about growing up at a time and in a context where the Sikhs must explain their origins and existence, emanating from the discourse of being “forever foreigners” (Tuan 1998) but also associated with the “enemy,”

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that is, Muslim men. In the media and popular discourse, a Saudi Muslim is the same as a Pakistani Muslim is the same as a Sikh. “Their racialized religious identity as a terrorist transforms their bodies into enemies of the state who must be policed and surveilled because they may commit acts of terror against the American people” (Selod 2018, 8). Identity formation hinges on the construction of an “us” and “them.” “What makes them ‘alike’ may be their ‘unlikeness’ from ‘us’ [dominant White group]” (Ahmed 2004, 44). Hate crime involves intentionally selecting an individual or group of individuals because of their race, religion, national origin, or ancestry, among other categories. But as Ahmed argues, What is at stake in hate crime is the perception of a group in the body of an individual. However, the way in which it is perception that is at stake is concealed by the word ‘because’ in hate crime legislation, which implies that group identity is already in place, and that it works only as a cause, rather than also being an effect of the crime. (2004, 55, emphasis in original)

Kirat considers his embodied identity in the face of such hatred to be a sign of “strength.” Being a “strong person” is relational. Implicit in Kirat’s use of this language is a construction of identity in relation to morally and spiritually “weak,” even “cowardly” people, referring in particular to fellow Sikh men and White supremacists. With respect to other Sikh men, Kirat is attributing an element of choice in adopting embodied identity, whereas those who cut their hair are willfully assimilating into, rather than resisting, dominant norms and also performing subordinate masculinity. In the process, he also reinforces biases within the Sikh community, in which those who do not perform embodied identity are considered patit and are placed at the bottom of the Khalsa hierarchy. The other group implied in Kirat’s notion of strength is White supremacists, who essentialize Sikhs and other Brown bodies by inflicting violence on them. Kirat takes pride in standing up to such symbolic and physical violence by performing embodied identity. Kirat talks about cultivating this strength through embarking on a historical and spiritual journey by doing research, studying religious texts, and talking to members of the older generation to find the meaning of religious signifiers that mark them as the “other.” As Kirat says, one of several possible responses to hatred and violent attempts to exclude Sikhs from the U.S. is to “assimilate.” For example, in her study of second-­ generation South Asians, Puryakastha includes narratives of young Sikh

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males who would cut their hair, if they found an opportunity (2005, 32). This is, in fact, a more typical response to emerge from within the community because, as I pointed out earlier, more Sikhs renounce religious symbols than maintain them. In contrast, Sikhs like Kirat make a conscious decision to keep enacting what has become a burdensome embodied identity, though they never explicitly label it as such. It is a complicated identity nevertheless, and they reconcile it by looking for the deeper meanings and value of religious symbols like kes. Kirat explains that religious symbols become more valuable in the diaspora precisely because some individuals perform the labor of maintaining them, when, in fact, they are a significant source of stigma. Like Kirat, 28-year-old Mohinder explains that religious symbols have assumed meaning for him precisely because of the struggles he faces in the post-9/11 context. While he faced discrimination even as a young Sikh male growing up in the U.S., these struggles acquired a new dimension because of the renewed and intensified xenophobia following the terrorist attacks. The meaning that Mohinder gives to the turban is because of the difficulties he has had to endure to keep wearing it. His own struggles compelled him to look back and imagine the experiences of his male ancestors. In the process, Mohinder traces the genealogy of suffering associated with maintaining visible identity as a Sikh and positions himself as the link connecting the chain of the past to future generations. I take a great deal of pride in my turban largely because of the struggles of my forefathers in preserving this identity … in the struggles of my father when he came to the U.S., and in my own personal struggles growing up, as well as the ones I endure today. I believe that all of these factors have made me who I am today, and because of this heritage I want to ensure that this identity is passed on to my children. … I may face an occasional incident here or there, but my ancestors fought even if it meant giving up their lives to fight for their faith. (Emphasis added)

In describing this lineage of suffering, Mohinder is connecting multiple temporalities while also evoking the idea that the personal is political. “Kes symbolizes a commitment to Sikhi in both private and public spheres, which are effectively one and the same in Sikhism” (Mooney 2015, 116). Mohinder’s individual body exists in a symbiotic relationship with the collective body of the community. His body “remembers” not only individual and personal experiences in the U.S. but becomes a site for constructing

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memories of the transnational collective body—the trials, tribulations, and triumphs associated with the emergence and development of the Sikh community in South Asia. For Sikhs like Mohinder, wearing the turban is a small battle in the larger fight to preserve the sanctity of the Sikh faith. The turban is part of the “sacred dress … a constant symbolic reminder to the wearer of personal spiritual commitments he or she has made” (Hamilton and Hawley 1999, 47). In keeping with the principle of non-­ duality, spirituality and the political are inextricably intertwined in Sikhism (Bhogal 2011). This connection between the personal and political can also be seen when some respondents revealed that instead of relinquishing their religious symbols to deal with racial violence, they became more conscious of not just maintaining them but also educating larger society about their significance. Daljit, a 27-year-old man, talked of how the events of 9/11 compelled him to undertake everyday pedagogical practices. Any opportunity I had to teach people about Sikhism I would take advantage of. … As the president of the Sikh club [at college], any public activity I could involve my club in I would do … rather than ignoring the people who stared or made comments I would go up to them and talk to them about the religion and the incident, do more community service, make sure I always wore my pagh and walked proud, even sat in the audience of a TV show so I could be seen on national TV.

This initiative to educate can also be found among other minority groups. For example, Peek (2005) found a similar tendency among her Muslim American youth respondents. Daljit talks of performing embodiment to dispel myths and stereotypes associated with racialized religious identity. The practice of minority communities assuming the mantle of educating dominant groups about their own marginalization adds to their already heavy burden. Nevertheless, pedagogical performances are also a way to reinforce membership in the community and consciously own the very visibility that stigmatizes them. Such pedagogical initiatives also show the difference between 9/11 and 1984. In the immediate aftermath of 1984, diasporic Sikhs did not have to engage with other minority communities’ experiences. Post-9/11 compelled them to draw boundaries and/or connections with other “others,” especially Muslims. Liberal Sikh organizations created several awareness campaigns to educate “ignorant Americans” about Sikhs. These

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campaigns had an explicit or implicit theme of representing Sikhs as “good citizens” and “peace-loving Americans,” different from “them” or Muslim “terrorists” (Puar 2007, 188–189). Such reasoning obscures common struggles facing non-White racial groups and ignores how racism and racialization are intrinsic to the “U.S. racial order” rather than “something that could be educated away” (Kaur 2020, 113). Gradually, however, Sikh advocacy organizations have been adopting a more critical stance toward the narrative of “mistaken identity” (The Sikh Coalition 2015).14 Despite such pedagogical initiatives differentiating 9/11 from 1984, in the aftermath of both these events religious symbols of hair and turbans came to signify political action and mobilization, and they infused new life into Sikhs’ relationships with the Guru and community members. After the terrorist attacks, embodied identity was performed in relation to Sikhs who do not maintain symbols on one hand, and the broader climate of White supremacist violence on the other. Embodied identity thus became a mode of self-reflection and reconciliation with aspects of one’s identity that were stigmatized by the dominant group but valorized within the community. For younger second-generation Sikhs, embodied identity also assumes meaning and significance in and through a transnational and transtemporal genealogy of suffering, ranging from the inception of the faith, the events of 1984, and the struggles of living in a post-9/11 world.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have shown how individual Sikhs who embody identity, while drawing on the origin story of religious symbols, transform the meanings of those symbols in relation to critical events and the impact of those events on Sikhs’ immediate and transnational socio-political contexts. I propose that a transnational framework of racial formation allows us to understand that, for diasporic groups such as Sikhs, minority consciousness does not first emerge in the migrant context but instead layers on top of an already existing identity as “other.” In responding to exclusionary structural conditions during multiple times and in multiple contexts, diasporic Sikh subjects generate “new” signifiers for the “old” signified, that is, hair and the turban. In the process, they construct an embodied transnational collective body. The Sikh collective body is greater 14  https://www.sikhcoalition.org/blog/2015/responding-to-hate-ca-gurdwaravandalism-case/.

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than the sum of individual corporealities and affects, but it always exists in mutual interaction with individual practices. Sikhs’ embodied performance contains intersecting meanings: as a political action and mobilization, a defense mechanism, a revival of the waning relationship with the spiritual teacher, community members and collective traditions, and a symbolic salve to heal the wounded collective body. For diasporic Sikhs performing embodied identity contains meaning as both belonging and resistance— belonging to the faith-based community, as well as resistance against the tyranny of the Indian State in 1984 and the violence and wrath of racist individuals and groups post-9/11, 2001. The framework of transnational racialization allows us to look beyond race as a Euro-American category. It brings attention to how divergent ideas of race travel transnationally but ultimately culminate in constructing essentialized hierarchies inscribed on the individual and collective body. While racialization always underlies hostility against Sikhs in both India and the U.S., the critical events of 1984 and 9/11 exaggerated the process. The Sikh individual body was targeted during both these events, but by adopting embodied identity practices, a section of Sikhs employ this very stigmatized corporeality to forge and reinforce a transnational collective body.

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PART III

Place-Making/Identity-Making

CHAPTER 9

Of Tigers and Temples: The Jaffna Caste System in Transition During the Sri Lankan Civil War Prashanth Kuganathan

Two of the principal objectives of this edited volume are to assert the distinctiveness of the sociology of South Asia and articulate how it can push all sociologists to rethink core concepts, categories, and assumptions. Concerning social stratification, there is perhaps no other sociological concept or category in the world compared to caste as it is practiced in

E. Valentine Daniel, Rachel McDermott, Amarnath Amarasingam, Francesca Bremner, Joel Lee, Smitha Radhakrishnan, and Gowri Vijayakumar read various drafts of this chapter and provided necessary modifications. Darshan Ambalavanar, Mark Balmforth, Victoria Gross, Kaori Hatsumi, Dagmar Hellmann-Rajanayagam, Delon Madavan, John Rogers, Pathmanesan Sanmugeswaran, Paramsothy Thanges, and Sharika Thiranagama pointed me in the right direction at one point in time or another and/or provided me with their own work for me to use. This research was partially funded by the Dissertation Research Award in Sri Lankan Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, the Dean’s Grant for Student Research, and the International & Transcultural Studies Summer Research Grant, both from Teachers College, Columbia University. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Radhakrishnan, G. Vijayakumar (eds.), Sociology of South Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97030-7_9

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South Asia. While often compared to and conflated with class, which is a more malleable and mobile term applied to socioeconomic status, the primary requirement that dictates caste—endogamy—remains relatively rigid and static. One can perhaps transgress from one class to another with wealth accumulation, but it is nearly impossible for one to change one’s caste. While similar to class, the caste system is tied to the division of labor through hereditary occupation. Furthermore, this system of inequity and inequality is sanctioned by Hindu religious texts. Caste is such an inherent and integral part of South Asian society that even non-Hindus, including Christians and Buddhists, have inducted their own caste practices (Krishan 1998; Mahroof 2000; McDermott 2008). Thus, caste discrimination has followed those wanting to escape this oppressive system through religious conversion (Balmforth 2020; Silva 2017). Dominant academic understandings of caste primarily reference India. However, the dynamic, lived reality of caste in contemporary Sri Lanka explicitly challenges those understandings, as the effects of war and migration have contested traditional hierarchical structures. Scholars often overlook caste as a topic in Sri Lanka, focusing instead on language and ethnicity as the primary social groupings. This chapter examines caste theory and practice in Jaffna, the northernmost peninsular region of the country, known to be the cultural heartland of Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority. Although the population is almost homogeneously Tamil, Jaffna is a place of complicating contradictions and conundrums. While the Northern Province has been one of the most literate parts of the island from the nineteenth century onward (Arasaratnam 1994, 51–52; Wickramasinghe 2006, 77), Jaffna, in particular, has the notoriety of being the most caste-conscious region (Pfaffenberger 1994) 1 ̄ where a Brahminic type of ritual and worship is practiced at Agamic  Pfaffenberger (1994, 155) writes, “Jaffna’s Hindu revival movement … has long sought to ensure that the region’s shrines are constructed in strict accordance to medieval temple-­ ́ ̄ building manuals called the Saiva Agamas. These texts, or so claimed the temple management, prohibit Untouchable temple entry.” 1

P. Kuganathan (*) University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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Hindu temples by a primarily non-Brahmin population. While they are respected as superior in the caste hierarchy concerning Hindu ritual and worship, Brahmins consist of less than 1 percent of the population in Jaffna (Jeeweshwara Räsänen 2015, 83) and assert little social, economic, or political power outside the temple in Sri Lankan Tamil society in general. Yet, the dominant Veḷl ̣āl ̣ar2 caste—traditionally farmers and agricultural landlords—have over time come to prefer and protect the Brahminic Ā gamic traditions and rituals over the more unorthodox non-Brahmin forms of worship (Ambalavanar 2006, 392–393). In this first part of this chapter, I explain this phenomenon as a product of Sanskritization—a theory and term coined by Srinivas (1966)—to explain Veḷḷāḷar cultural domination and also the increase in the caste’s size. The consolidation of Veḷḷāḷar power and the maintenance of the caste’s hegemony would not have been possible if not for slavery (Arasaratnam 1981; Balmforth 2020; Wickramasinghe and Schrikker 2019). I, therefore, argue against some of the previous research that attempts to place Jaffna castes within the system of varṇa3—an antiquated theory that was colonially propagated for hierarchical caste classification that may have been erroneously applied to the Tamil castes in northern Sri Lanka and southern India—as caste hierarchy as it is expressed through varṇa has not been an ontological reality for Sri Lanka’s Tamils. Latour (2005, 28) writes, “the central intuition of sociology should be that at any given moment actors are made to fit in a group … when you read social theorists, it seems that the main, the crucial, the most urgent question should be which grouping is preferable to start a social enquiry” (emphasis in original). This is what scholars of caste, including those on the northern Sri Lankan system, have done with varṇa. Latour continues, “The choice is thus clear: either we follow social theorists and begin our travel by setting up at the start which kind of group and which level of analysis we will focus on, or we follow the actors’ own ways and begin our travels by the traces left behind by their activity of forming and dismantling groups” (29). For a place like Sri Lanka, where the dynamics of war 2  As this is a Tamil world, it is spelled a variety of ways in English academic literature, including Vellala or Vellalah. 3  According to the Dharmasá ̄stras, there are four hierarchical varṇas or “cosmogonic ́ dra human social types”: Brāhmaṇa (priest), Kṣatriya (ruler), Vaisya ́ (commoners), and Sū (servant) (Marriott 2002, 1–3). The former three are considered dvija varṇas or “twice-­ born” (Pfaffenberger 1982, 7), while Śūdras and those outside the system of varṇa are only “once-born.”

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have shaped caste, I argue the latter is the preferred mode and more suitable research method. In the second section, I show that the interethnic war between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE—also referred to as the “Tigers”4 or “the movement”5) and the various successive Sinhalese government regimes brought about a rupture in intra-Tamil social relations, specifically regarding Veḷḷāḷar caste dominance. With the rise of Tamil militancy, specifically under the leadership of LTTE founder Velupillai Prabhakaran (1954–2009), we see for the first time a non-Veḷḷāḷar figure at the helm of Tamil nationalism. While the LTTE did not eradicate the caste system or eliminate caste discrimination, some social policy initiatives and implementations abolished certain controversial practices and reduced overt caste discrimination in areas under their control (Thanges and Silva 2009, 60).6 In the final section, I examine contemporary Hindu places of worship in Jaffna as examples to show how caste dominance and discrimination re-emerge in the postwar period. Religious spaces such as the kōvil,7 the church, and the mosque are usually the most common public spaces Jaffna people frequent outside their respective places of work or education. Among the Hindus in rural Jaffna in particular, Sanmugeswaran (2010, 224) finds that “the temple is considered to be the most important social unit.” He thus refers to Jaffna Hindus as a “temple-centered” community (225). As Hindu temples have been common sites for caste discrimination in pre-war Jaffna, the re-emergence of this phenomenon in this postwar period is not particularly unexpected. This chapter is based on ethnographic field research conducted at various periods in the Jaffna Peninsula between 2011 and 2018—starting approximately two years after the civil war. I completed approximately fifty unstructured interviews in Tamil and some English with a wide array of residents, including ex-militants, temple priests, and worshippers who were found through a snowball sampling methodology of trusted interlocutors. As interview questions dealt with the sensitive topics of both  Pulikaḷ in Tamil.  Iyakkam in Tamil. 6  In making this argument, I recognize the stark realities of life under authoritarian militancy (Thiranagama 2011) and am not positing an argument that condones militant rule. Rather, I analyze the social policy of caste under militant rule in a nuanced and multilayered environment. 7  Tamil word for temple sometimes spelled and pronounced as kōyil. 4 5

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caste and war, a level of trustworthiness had to be established between the researcher and informants, especially since the Northern Province was (and continues to be) heavily militarized and under ongoing government surveillance. Due to this, interviews were conducted as informal conversations, lasting from as little as fifteen minutes to as long as two hours, with no electronic recording devices. Detailed notes were taken during interviews utilizing thick description. During this fieldwork, I learned the difficulties of being a diaspora researcher. My being from a Veḷḷāḷar Tamil background, albeit born and raised in the diaspora, did make asking direct questions about one’s caste awkward and uncomfortable, especially since my ancestry and ability to speak Tamil placed me locally in the eyes of some informants. Furthermore, my being a male meant that most of my interviewees naturally tended to also be male, as socializing between unknown and unrelated men and women in Jaffna is not common. However, I interviewed some women, particularly in group settings. One of the motives of this chapter is to convey how the contemporary caste system has manifested itself differently in northern Sri Lanka vis-à-vis a place like Tamil Nadu—both Tamil-speaking regions with shared cultural, religious, and caste practices in two separate nation-states, divided by a narrow body of water known as the Palk Strait. While the latter experienced an uproar of anti-Brahmin policies and caste-based politics post-­ independence, the former did not. Instead, caste experience in contemporary Tamil-speaking Sri Lanka has been shaped by its interactions with ethnic conflict, militancy, displacement, migration, and resettlement—a unique situation from any other region in South Asia. Unlike India’s caste system, caste in Sri Lanka is silent, undocumented by the State, and not overtly politicized—yet caste dynamics are salient, particularly in the Tamil-speaking north. This chapter thus examines caste through these various contextual interactions with local power structures, histories, and political struggles to articulate how a situated and rigid system is also malleable and in a state of flux as it reacts to the dynamic society within which it is entrenched.

(Re)Classifying Caste in Jaffna Forty-two castes in Jaffna were recorded by Casie Chitty in 1834 (as cited in Jeeweshwara Räsänen 2015, 83). Today, Jeeweshwara Räsänen (2015, 83) finds just over twenty castes active in Jaffna. The chart below shows each respective caste’s percentage of the population in Jaffna (see Fig. 9.1).

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Fig. 9.1  Castes in Jaffna. (Chart by author based on data from Jeeweshwara Räsänen (2015))

Castes in Jaffna

Veḷḷāḷar / agricultural landlords and farmers 50% Karaiyār / deep-sea fishermen 10% Paḷḷar / agricultural laborers 9% Naḷavar / toddy tappers 9% Kōviyar / herders, domestic servants (of Veḷḷāḷars) 7% Paṟaiyar / funeral drummers 2.7% Taccar / carpenters 2% Mukkuvar / fishermen 2% Vaṇṇār / dhobis (washermen) 1.5% Paṇṭāram / garland makers 1% Ampaṭṭar / barbers 0.9%

Of these groups, the Vaṇṇa ̄r (dhobis or washermen), the Ampaṭt ̣ar (barbers), the Naḷavar (toddy tappers), the Paḷl ̣ar (agricultural laborers), and the Paṟaiyar (funeral drummers) castes have traditionally been some of the most marginalized in Jaffna. These five are collectively referred to as the Pañcamar castes. Of the Pañcamar castes, the latter four were formerly considered untouchable8 by Tamil society in Sri Lanka and were 8  While used in some academic literature on Sri Lanka, Ambedkar’s term Dalit is not a common appellation for those formerly considered untouchable in Sri Lanka, nor is it a common term of self-identification by people from these communities.

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historically denied entry to Ā gamic temples in Jaffna. I refer to them as oppressed castes. In the chart, note the percentage of the Veḷḷāḷar and Karaiyār (deep-sea fishermen) castes, respectively; the size of the Veḷḷāḷar caste has aided in the maintenance of their dominance, as the other castes appear fragmented in proportion. The Karaiyār caste, while only 10 percent of the population, is the largest caste after the Veḷḷāḷars. Furthermore, they have never been directly subordinated to or subjugated by the Veḷḷāḷars. Due to both of these facts, we see that the Karaiyār caste could contest Veḷḷāḷar hegemony. It is essential to mention that these caste demographics are from Pfaffenberger (1982, 47), published before the war’s commencement, and no postwar caste population data are available. In British India, caste was a significant identity marker. Scholars have argued that specific colonial processes such as census enumeration aided in solidifying the concept of caste as it is known today (Bayly 1999, 4; Cohn 1990, 248; Dirks 2001, 8–9). In contrast, Rogers (2004, 72) points out that from the modern census’s commencement in British Ceylon in 1871, caste-specific data were not collected. He argues that this is why it is a more crucial social category at the official level in India than Sri Lanka. Because caste data are enumerated in India, the State has been able to implement policies geared at ameliorating the lives of citizens coming from oppressed caste backgrounds, such as education and employment reservations.9 While the Sri Lankan constitution outlawed caste-based discrimination (Silva and Thanges 2009, 15), no progressive legislation has been implemented to directly elevate or empower oppressed castes because there is no caste-based data collected by the State, irrespective of the ethnic group. So, while the academic literature states that the Veḷḷāḷar caste accounts for about half of Jaffna’s population, Paramsothy (2015) estimates that the current population in the Jaffna District may be around 50 percent Pañcamar with the outward flow of migration from the peninsula during the war. This means that while the Veḷḷāḷar caste still tends to be the most dominant and privileged, they may no longer constitute the majority. While my motive is not to deemphasize precolonial caste discrimination, caste solidification arguments based on India (Bayly 1999; Cohn 1990; Dirks 2001) have overemphasized the importance of varṇa and conflated its meaning with caste. At the most rudimentary level, Veḷḷāḷar domination and Pañcamar subjugation can be explained using varṇa. As mentioned above, four out of the five Pañcamar castes are avarṇa or 9

 The term “reservations” in India is akin to affirmative action in the United States.

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outcaste, as they are outside the system of the four varṇas, which rendered them “untouchable.” Academics studying social stratification in Jaffna have tried to categorize each of these endogamous groups according to how early European scholars have traditionally organized such entities in India—by trying to classify each caste or jāti10 into a particular varṇa— perhaps assuming that from this process, a hierarchical order would be made apparent. These classifications within varṇa, however, do not offer a nuanced perspective of caste hierarchy and inter-caste interaction as it operates on the ground. Casie Chitty (2004, 41–48) classifies the Veḷḷāḷar caste as Vais ́ya or “commoners,” and all other castes—such as the various ́ fishermen castes, various artisan castes, and the Pañcamar castes—as Sūdra or “servants.” Raghavan (1971, 129) writes that Veḷḷāḷars are landowning agriculturalists, who “aspire [emphasis mine] to belong to the Vasya caste.” Following the research models conducted by earlier scholars in South India, Pfaffenberger (1982, 9) designates all castes of Tamils to be either Brahmin, Śūdra, or “untouchable.” David’s (1972) results are the most complicated, placing the Veḷḷāḷar within the Śūdra varṇa; the Caiva Ceṭt ̣i (merchants), the weaver castes, and the Cāṇt ̣ār (oil mongers) within the Vaiśya varṇa; and the Karaiyār within the Kṣatriya (ruler) varṇa. Several Tamils involved in the anti-Brahmin and Self Respect Movements in India rejected this process of comparing and conflating varṇa with jāti. Maraimalai Adigal (as cited in Pandian 1994, 92–93) argued, “in the Tamil country nobody will call himself a Sudra, or a Vaisya or a Kshatriya. The Tamils are either agriculturalists or traders, artisans or labourers; every class of people follows a hereditary profession and calls themselves by the name of that profession.” Similarly, Price (1996, 61) writes, The Government of Madras recognized fairly early that the fourfold division did not describe south Indian society adequately … the government decided that in Tamil country the population of caste Hindus consisted of Brahmins and Sudras. … Dominant castes like the land-controlling Vellalar, whose practices were compatible with Brahminic ideas of purity, were considered high-ranking Sudras in the government system; although, when government census officers placed Vellalars in the ‘Sat-Sudra or Good Sudra’ category in its 1901 census, Vellalar castemen petitioned the government, protesting this designation and saying that their reputation had suffered as a result. 10  McKim Marriott (2002, 1) refers to jāti as “one of the many thousands of marriage networks among South Asian families.”

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The British thus believed that except for the Brahmins, who constituted a minority of about 3 percent of Madras Presidency (Pandian 1994, 85–86), all other castes in the Tamil country could only be classified within the Śūdra varṇa or as “untouchable,” thus rendering all non-Brahmin Tamils as “servant” or avarṇa status in 1901, despite their myriad hereditary occupations. Since western colonialism played a crucial role in conflating caste with varṇa, such historical classifications must be interrogated and decolonized. To complicate matters further, colonialism played a role in the aggrandizement and promotion of specific caste communities. Arasaratnam (1981) provides this as a reasoning for the rise of the Veḷḷāḷar caste in Sri Lanka. He argues that the eighteenth century is crucial to the ascendency of the Veḷḷāḷars, as their patronizing of English education, primarily provided by Christian missionaries, allowed for them to occupy clerical, professional, and executive bureaucratic positions in the British administration. This bestowed upon them a status directly below the British in the colonial chain of command in Ceylon—a position they did not occupy under the previous Dutch or Portuguese regimes (377–378; 391). They grew in power, prestige, and population, and he finds that their size in numbers impacted their dominance (385). The percentage of the Veḷḷāḷar caste increased substantially from 30 to 50 percent in the Jaffna region from 1790 to 1950 (Banks 1957, 411). Arasaratnam (1981, 379) finds that there has been a convergence of multiple disparate groups into the Veḷḷāḷar fold over the past four centuries, culminating in the consolidation of the contemporary caste that was, at one point, half the population of the Jaffna peninsula. On this, Arasaratnam writes, “there have been cases of quite distinct castes based on the land calling themselves Vellalar and claiming to belong to that caste. In the course of time they intermarry with older Vellalar families and become accepted” (385). He quotes and translates an Indian Tamil proverb that expresses the fusion of the Veḷḷāḷar caste: “Kallas, Maravas and Akampadiyas gradually come to be Vellalars” (385).11 This shows one of the only ways in which caste can be modified— but, as exemplified, it is not something that a single individual can take on at one particular time or moment but rather a collective process over

11  In English transliteration from the Tamil original: Kallar, Maravar, Kaṉatākampaṭiyar mella mella vantu Velḷ ạ ̄ḷar av̄ ār. It is important to note that this Indian proverb applies analogically to the Jaffna experience but is not derived from the Jaffna experience as such.

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generations. Srinivas (1966, 6) has called this process Sanskritization, which he describes as the process by which a “low” Hindu caste, or tribal or other group, changes its customs, ritual, ideology, and way of life in the direction of a high, and frequently, “twice-born” caste. Generally, such changes are followed by a claim to a higher position in the caste hierarchy than that traditionally conceded to the claimant caste by the local community. The claim is usually made over a period of time, in fact, a generation or two, before the “arrival” is conceded.

The growth of the Veḷḷāḷar caste in Jaffna, as Arasaratnam (1981) finds, was due to this process. He writes that “their aggrandisement [was] at the expense of the other castes” (378). Veḷḷāḷar domination was not just at the indirect expense of others. It was also due to the direct subjugation of those below them—the Pañcamar castes, in particular. Thus, the caste system, particularly in Sri Lanka, needs to be looked at more extensively through the lens of slavery.12 Arasaratnam (1981) finds that the Te ̄cavaḻamai—customary law applicable to Tamils in the Northern Province still adhered to today—had provisions regarding slavery (387). He writes that Jaffna Veḷḷāḷars periodically imported Naḷavar and Paḷḷar slaves in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (388), with slavery only being abolished in 1844 (Pfaffenberger 1994, 147). The Naḷavars, specifically, were initially obliged to serve only the State and royalty, but the increase in demand for labor transformed them into serf laborers for Veḷḷāḷar landlords (Arasaratnam 1981, 381). The Veḷḷāḷars exploited their positions of authority as village officials by annexing uninhabited public property (386) and diverting labor intended for the State to themselves (387). We thus see in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Naḷavar and Paḷḷar laborers forced to squat on Veḷḷāḷar-owned land in exchange for performing domestic and agricultural labor (388; Banks 1971, 71–74). In this system, one group built and maintained much of its wealth and power by the direct, forcible exploitation of others. Aṭimai and kuṭimai are two names for collective caste groups that have traditionally served the Veḷḷāḷar caste, and the way that they are connected to the Veḷḷāḷars shows this history of slavery in Jaffna. Both aṭimai and 12  Two very recent articles by Balmforth (2020) and Wickramasinghe and Schrikker (2019) look at the history of slavery in Jaffna.

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kuṭimai loosely translate to slave or servant.13 However, they are viewed as two different servitude categories varying in ownership or control by the dominant caste. Hocart (1950, 7) writes that the at ̣imai are slaves, and the kuṭimai are vassals who serve the Tamil feudal lord on various occasions. Raghavan (1971, 167) describes the at ̣imai as castes “attached” to the Veḷḷāḷar, as they were their former slaves. The aṭimai comprised the Kōviyar (herders or domestic servants of Veḷḷāḷars), Naḷavar, and Paḷḷar castes. The kuṭimai, on the other hand, were not private slaves to any family but served society in general. The kuṭimai comprised the Ampaṭṭar, Vaṇṇār, Paṟaiyar, and various artisan castes. Both the aṭimai and kuṭimai castes traditionally had distinct roles at various ceremonies of the Veḷḷāḷars, such as weddings and funerals.14 David (1972) uses “bound” and “nonbound” modes to classify various Jaffna castes, arguing that some castes are in “bound” hierarchical relationships with one another, while others are in “nonbound” nonhierarchical relationships. He finds that the Karaiyārs, the dominant fisher caste in Jaffna, do not necessarily presume the Veḷḷāḷars to be superior, as their inter-caste interaction is limited to the mercantile scheme, and they are not “bound” or linked to the Veḷḷāḷars through a history of slavery or ritual servitude. David, therefore, provides a ground-up analysis of caste in Jaffna that is guided by lived experience, putting into question the assumed hierarchies at the time. While David’s research was conducted before the war and ascendency of the LTTE, it substantiates that Veḷḷāḷar hegemony could indeed be contested.

Of Tigers: The Construction of a Cohesive Tamil Nationalism Amidst Caste Difference In this section, I posit that the caste policies implemented by the LTTE in the areas under its direct control after 1985 were an attempt to unify disparate elements of Tamil nationalism, specifically regarding caste difference, and thus unsettled Veḷḷāḷar dominance. Before the ascendency of the LTTE, Tamil identity as it was conceptualized and perceived in Sri Lanka, especially in the realm of governance and politics, was distinctly a Veḷḷāḷar one. The literature shows that the collective consciousness of ethnic Tamil 13  In South India, the kuṭimai are known as the right-side castes and the aṭimai are known as the left-side castes (Pfaffenberger 1982, 38). 14  Described in detail by David (1972).

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subjectivity encompassing all Tamil-speaking castes in Sri Lanka is a relatively modern phenomenon.15 Hellmann-Rajanayagam (1994, 28) writes, “to be a Tamil meant to be a Vellalar, and to be a Vellalar meant to be a Tamil.” She goes on to explain that Tamil-speaking non-Veḷḷāḷars were not considered Tamil until the end of the nineteenth century (28). Pfaffenberger (1982, 96) writes that the at ̣imai castes were “viewed as ‘stranger’ peoples,” perhaps due to their history of being outsiders, as they were imported as slaves from India by the Veḷḷāḷars. He explains that Jaffna Tamils view the Veddas16 as an inferior “jungle people” (98).17 He then correlates how they are viewed to that of the aṭimai, who are looked upon similarly due to suppositions that they contain indigeneity to some degree. These caste groups are therefore also known as āṭitirāviṭas18 (96). “Thus, from quite early, an ethnic moment crept into the concept of caste among the Tamils, and a concept of caste into ‘ethnic’ differentiations,” writes Hellmann-Rajanayagam (1994, 28). Similarly, Wickramasinghe (2006, 262) writes, “Many Vellalas believed that Minority Tamils19 were non-Tamilian, aboriginal people of low status. The feeling of being apart was internalized by Paḷḷars and Naḷavars who sometimes referred to Vellalas as ‘Tamils.’” According to Pfaffenberger (1994, 83), the stigma attached to the perceived pollution that the oppressed castes came into contact with through their occupations denied them “full membership in the Tamil community,” with some Veḷḷāḷars denying that the Naḷavars and Paḷḷars were indeed Tamil people as late as the early 1970s. This was a turbulent time when moderate attempts for Tamil rights with the State were failing, and there was a transition to ­militancy, of which several groups were formed and were recruiting members. With this rise of Tamil nationalism, in which the north and east of the island were claimed as the ancestral Tamil homeland, it does not seem 15  This can be correlated to Muslims in Sri Lanka, who speak Tamil as their mother tongue but do not identify as ethnic Tamils. 16  Indigenous people of Sri Lanka. 17  This view is not restricted to Jaffna Tamils. Other Sri Lankans view the Veddas in a similar light. 18  Original Dravidians. While āt ̣itirāviṭa is not a common term of self-identification in Jaffna, it is used by Indian Tamils in the Hill Country region of Sri Lanka (Balasundaram et al. 2009, 82) and by Dalits in Tamil Nadu. 19  “Minority Tamils” is a term Wickramasinghe (2006) and Pfaffenberger (1994) use to describe Pañcamars, as these castes used to form a minority within Veḷḷāḷar-dominated Jaffna Tamil society. I refrain from using this term in order to avoid confusion with the status of Tamils in general vis-à-vis the Sinhalese majority in Sri Lanka.

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coincidental that the questioning of Naḷavar and Paḷḷar Tamilness ceased to be an issue when juxtaposed with the more significant Sinhala-Tamil ethnic divide. The militant elements of Tamil nationalism in the 1970s emerged in response to several shortcomings of the Veḷlạ l̄ ạ r-dominated Tamil nationalist party in parliament, the Federal Party (FP). This political party that was fighting in Colombo for Tamil rights with one hand was simultaneously oppressing a segment of its electorate with the other. Wickramasinghe (2006, 277) points out that the Youth League of the FP was losing faith in their elderly leadership and began to radicalize—possibly due to the party’s ineffective stand on the 1968 temple-entry crisis,20 which was taken to avoid alienating their conservative Veḷlạ l̄ ạ r constituents. HellmannRajanayagam (1993, 262) points out that the FP in its 1949 manifesto had pledged to abolish caste, which she writes “was mere rhetoric.” The formation of the LTTE and other paramilitaries in the 1970s represents a transitional period to Tamil nationalism’s radicalization. The younger generation now included social and economic reforms into their demands of ethnic equality (Hellmann-Rajanayagam 1994, 34–35). While militancy was a method of rebellion employed by Veḷḷāḷar youth to fight the chauvinist State and its policies of ethnolinguistic oppression, for Pañcamar youth, militancy was a revolutionary attempt at emancipation from the doubly binding confines of inter-communal racism and intra-­ Tamil social oppression. The LTTE was naturally conducive to Pañcamars, as they had banned caste discrimination in the 1980s (Thanges and Silva 2009, 60). While a politically progressive move, this decision may have also been taken to garner their support for power consolidation purposes and deflect from possible Veḷḷāḷar critique of the LTTE’s non-Veḷḷāḷar leadership. Furthermore, they succeeded in claiming to be the sole representative of the Tamil people by ruthlessly eliminating much of their opposition. Researchers have only been able to speculate about the caste composition of the movement. As caste demographics are not recorded in Sri Lanka, even the statistics available on caste composition and proportion in the country are educated estimates at best. While there has been research and ethnography conducted on the LTTE within the camps and trenches 20  Described in detail by Pfaffenberger (1994). People from oppressed castes protested peacefully demanding temple entry at Maviddapuram, one of Jaffna’s most revered Ā gamic Hindu shrines. Veḷḷāḷars retaliated with violence, causing riots. After the riots ended, temple doors all over the peninsula were gradually opened to the oppressed castes.

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in the de-­facto regions they administered,21 none have focused explicitly on or include caste. Ravikumar (2002) asserts “the majority of LTTE cadres happen to be Dalit.” Daniel (1996, 163) finds “no evidence that there are proportionately fewer Veḷḷāḷas among the militants than there are in the general Tamil population.” Thanges and Silva (2009, 60) find that “many” leaders and cadres from the LTTE stem from “lower and intermediate castes.” Roberts (2009, 84) writes, In terms of folk terminology common throughout Sri Lanka, one based implicitly on a stratification model of class, a broad overview over three decades suggests that the LTTE’s active cadre has a distinctly lower-middle-­ class and working-class character. The number of upper-middle-class personnel in the ranks of those fighting within Sri Lanka seems to have been relatively small.

This working-class character in the LTTE is likely due to the push factors of migration, and it further challenged Veḷḷāḷar dominance. Families with sufficient resources could escape the warzone to places like Colombo, with an overwhelming proportion emigrating abroad.22 Many Tamil families left their homes in LTTE-controlled regions, which was almost one-­ fourth of the country at its highest point of rule (DeVotta 2009, 1023), to evade the “one person per family” policy of forced conscription the LTTE had in place (1032). The Veḷḷāḷar caste, due to their numeric and economic dominance, most likely constituted the majority of emigrants.23 Thanges and Silva (2009, 60) write, “there were many waves of selective out-migration of ‘high-caste’ and ‘high-class’ Vellālar families from Jaffna, thereby leaving a political and social vacuum in Jaffna society and enabling the downtrodden to assert themselves like never before.” Siddhartan  See Sangarasivam (2000) and Trawick (2007).  While many Sri Lankan Tamils fled to neighboring India as refugees, most have gone to western countries. The Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora has exponentially increased since 1983. George (2011, 459) estimates the number to be more than one million. Toronto has the largest number, with the diaspora population being at least 150,000 (465). Thiranagama (2011, 247) calls Colombo the “shadow diaspora,” as Tamils who have left the north and east were often in a transitional period of waiting while residing in Colombo, looking for any means to migrate abroad. 23  While much academic research has been published on the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora, none specifically include caste compositions of communities. There is increasing research, however, on specific caste communities within the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora, most recently by Paramsothy (2018). 21 22

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(2003) argues that a disproportionate number of persons from the Veḷḷāḷar caste have successfully been able to leave the peninsula for Colombo and abroad due to the extent of their social networks. Similarly, Thiranagama (2018, 373) finds that non-English-speaking European countries tend to have a higher concentration of non-Veḷḷāḷar Tamils, as the English-speaking destinations were the “preferred” choice, where Veḷḷāḷar Tamils with resources and relations were more successfully able to migrate. During my field research, the LTTE cadres I interviewed insisted they were unaware of other cadres’ caste backgrounds while in the movement, except the leadership and those personally known to them. They said lower-ranking cadres were often unaware of each other’s ranks to foster a sense of brotherhood. Of the cadres I interviewed, only one, whom I call Rajendra, disclosed that he is from a Veḷḷāḷar background; he is also one of the few cadres I interviewed who are proficient in English. While the others I interviewed knew I was researching caste and spoke quite openly about their opinions, none of them volunteered their caste backgrounds, nor did I ask. They explained why they joined “the movement” and shared complex opinions on Sri Lankan politics—both during the war and after. Most of them did not seem blindly indoctrinated by Tamil nationalism, nor did they romanticize it, as is often done in the diaspora. The only cadre I interviewed who was forcibly recruited was a female conscripted in her late teenage years, but the others said they joined out of their own free will when they were young adults. Most did not seem to harbor any animosity toward the LTTE or its leadership. While many articulated that what they fought for at the time was right, they could also critique what they thought was wrong with the movement. Rajendra mentioned that he thought the Tigers became too authoritarian and violent post-1990. He described Tamils in the diaspora who will accept nothing less than an independent homeland and want to continue fighting for this cause as “radical.” Another, whom I call Illango, admitted Prabhakaran, the founder of the LTTE, was a dictator and said that the Tigers’ expulsion of Jaffna’s northern Muslim community was one of their greatest blunders.24 Both of them acknowledged that they believe caste to be a social evil and do not deny its contemporary existence in Jaffna, as many still do. 24  In 1990, the LTTE expelled Muslims in areas under their control in the Northern Province, including the Jaffna Peninsula. Thiranagama (2011) has written in detail about this and calls this process of ethnic cleansing “the Eviction.”

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The interview data collected suggest that the anti-caste ideology and social reform policies of the LTTE aided in ameliorating the lives of Pañcamar castes living under its jurisdiction, particularly by moving out of their traditional caste occupations and into vacant positions that were available due to Veḷḷāḷar outmigration. A Paḷḷar youth I call Roshan claimed the war had been empowering and emancipatory for the Pañcamar castes because it allowed many to leave their traditional occupations, which they no longer wanted to perform. He mentioned that this would not have happened if not for the LTTE and their anti-caste policy. He felt the LTTE had transformed society’s perceptions of people from the oppressed castes, especially since he had family members who garnered respect from the people of privileged castes due to their involvement in the movement. He mentioned that it was primarily “our people”—indicative of those who are of oppressed caste background—who fought for Tamil liberation within the movement, as many of the Veḷḷāḷar people had left. As war broke exclusive Veḷḷāḷar domination, primarily due to their migration abroad, some Pañcamars were able to move into other employment areas to fill the void. Many Pañcamars entered the University of Jaffna and other universities in Sri Lanka. For example, Rajan, a community organizer from the Naḷavar caste, mentioned that he had a daughter in a Colombo medical school. Rajendra claimed the militant group was sincere in its efforts to eradicate casteism. He proudly proclaimed that the LTTE banned the playing of the paṟai (funeral drum) at funerals, which was done exclusively by the Paṟaiyar caste. The LTTE believed that this custom publicly reinforced caste hierarchy and the servitude the Paṟaiyar caste performed to the privileged castes, primarily to the dominant Veḷḷāḷars. During this ban, many from the Paṟaiyar caste moved out of this traditional occupation into other employment sectors. Illango, in contrast, mentioned he thought the playing of the paṟai was an important Tamil custom that would have been lost permanently if the ban continued. This funeral tradition was important enough to Jaffna Tamils to resurface after the LTTE lost its reign on the peninsula. Apart from the outright banning of certain caste occupations (like the playing of the paṟai), LTTE caste policy included modifying how certain castes interacted with one another in transaction. Veḷḷāḷars have had a long history in having not only the traditional services of the “bound” castes performed for them at their homes, but they have also utilized these castes for specific ritual purposes during certain life events, such as weddings and funerals (David 1972), which shows a history of these respective castes’

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deference and servitude to the Veḷḷāḷar caste. The LTTE banned Vaṇṇār and Ampat ̣ṭar workers from making house calls to homes (Thanges and Silva 2009, 76), which was a common practice before the war. In LTTE-­ controlled areas, the Vaṇṇār and Ampat ̣ṭar castes continued their respective professions as dhobis and barbers, but they did so in a retail-style fashion; clients now visited them at their place of business and paid for their services in cash. This LTTE policy essentially transformed the “bound” relationship that David (1972) writes the Veḷḷāḷars had with these castes into a “nonbound” one, eliminating customs stemming from the history of slavery. For the most part, this policy has continued unofficially into the postwar period, even with the LTTE’s demise. Another LTTE policy implementation was the banning of calling someone by their caste name. Jeeweshwara Räsänen (2015, 156) writes that in social conflicts in Jaffna, it was a local custom for people of privileged caste to verbally abuse their opponents from an oppressed caste by verbally calling out their caste name—a degradation that “deeply hurts and humiliates the entire collective of the lower caste.” She writes that under the LTTE de-facto administration in Jaffna from 1990 to 1995, those found to offend others using the victim’s caste names were punished (20). During my field research, several Pañcamar interlocutors had mentioned that this practice rarely occurs anymore. A Veḷḷāḷar homemaker I call Yasodha recalled a time before the war when this degrading verbal abuse was socially acceptable. Having lived through the LTTE regime, she said the fear of punishment quickly put an end to even the thought of overtly uttering one’s caste name in public. On if it is done today, as the LTTE is no longer in power to enforce its policy, she said, “We wouldn’t dare. They [the Pañcamars] would beat us if we did.” Both existing scholarship and my interviews suggest that it was through a sense of fear that ensured LTTE orders, decrees, and policies were adhered to. “Anyone thought to undermine the organization was considered a traitor and was targeted for assassination,” writes DeVotta (2009, 1031). Hellmann-Rajanayagam (1994, 64) writes, “The organisation of public life in Jaffna seems to be as tightly disciplined as that of LTTE itself.” Bremner (2013, 48–50) finds that apart from the more traditional forms of punishment the LTTE used to enforce caste policy, such as physical violence and imprisonment, they also employed a more creative sort of justice that entailed “an inversion of caste roles.” In one example, a Veḷḷāḷar woman was imprisoned by the LTTE for caste discrimination, and her punishment included being served food that was cooked by the woman

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she discriminated against.25 In another example, a Veḷḷāḷar group that served castes they considered inferior water in coconut shells (to avoid the perceived permanent pollution to their tumblers, cups, or glasses) were forced to drink water from the very shells they served those whom they had oppressed. These punishment examples show an attempt to break caste taboos of perceived pollution and make the perpetrators suffer the same indignity and humiliation they caused their victims. Nevertheless, these shifts do not mean that caste disappeared. Thanges and Silva (2009, 60) find that caste just became “more of a hidden phenomenon in Jaffna society” under the command of the LTTE. To substantiate this, Illango described the LTTE’s ban on certain caste practices as merely “covering it with a blanket”—for even during the time of war and in regions under their command, while inter-caste marriage occurred in the LTTE, endogamy was strictly adhered to by civilians. Almost all informants indicated that the only way caste endogamy could be broken today would be for an inter-caste couple to leave Jaffna. Furthermore, caste segregation was maintained by those during displacement (Hashmi and Kuganathan 2017, 17; Silva and Thanges 2009). What this field research has uncovered, however, is that while the caste policy implementations of the LTTE did not end caste practice or discrimination, it does seem to have ended overt and unsubtle forms of caste atrocity and abuse, which were quite prevalent before the war.

Of Temples: Caste Assertions in Contemporary Hindu Places of Worship Caste, religious texts, and institutions reinforce each other symbiotically, each sanctioning and anchoring the other. Pfaffenberger (1994, 155), for ̄ example, finds that interpretation of the Caiva Agamas—the medieval temple-building manuals adhered to by the dominant Veḷḷāḷar caste—prohibits “Untouchable” temple entry. While ethnicity is the primary social grouping in Sri Lanka, as exemplified by the civil war, religion is also a crucial component of identity in the country, as it is in other parts of South Asia. Pre-war ethnographies on Tamils in Sri Lanka (David 1972; Pfaffenberger 1982) have shown how places of worship and religious 25  Marriott (1968) in intricate detail explains the correlation between caste ranking and food consumption. Typically, “higher” castes will not consume cooked food from “lower” castes.

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ritual are significant to Tamil daily life. While this research focuses on Hindus, analogies regarding the level of importance can be made to Tamil Christian communities. Even during active phases of the war, when civilians were caught in the crossfire of shelling or faced aerial bombardment, churches and temples were places where internally displaced people sought refuge and solace. Research conducted during the conflict period has highlighted how faith, prayer, and worship aided Christians/Catholics (Hatsumi 2012) and Hindus (Lawrence 2003) to endure and overcome war’s suffering. However, since many Tamil paramilitaries—including the LTTE—subscribed to socialist and leftist ideology, they did not induct any religious philosophy into their respective movements or prefer any particular religion. The LTTE had senior leaders coming from both Hindu and Christian backgrounds. Lawrence (2003, 106) finds that the LTTE was cautious about remaining secular not to fester any division between Tamils that could weaken their movement. Therefore, while they policed caste, religious spaces were areas in which they broadly did not intervene. Caste, however, is ever prevalent in religious space in Tamil Sri Lanka, particularly in the Hindu sphere of practice. When I first started conducting field research on caste in Jaffna, I was immediately pointed to various temples by informants and told about their respective histories concerning caste relations. Many of the stories I heard were about temple entry—primarily Ā gamic temples with Brahmin priests and Veḷḷāḷar management that had histories of denying entry to the castes formerly considered untouchable. Out of 1309 Hindu temples in the Jaffna District in 1967, only 17 percent were open to oppressed castes (Ceylon Observer, as cited in Pfaffenberger 1994, 144). In the most infamous incident, the temple-entry crisis of 1968, people from the oppressed castes launched a satyagraha (peaceful protest) outside the doors of a notable Ā gamic temple at Maviddapuram, demanding that the Veḷḷāḷars allow them entry (Pfaffenberger 1994). This standoff of about a week led to violence. Veḷḷāḷar gangs attacked the peaceful protesters, which caught national attention and even the interest of political parties in the south, much to the reluctance of Tamil politicians who did not want Sinhalese interference in what they considered an internal Tamil affair. Maviddapuram Kandasamy Kōvil eventually opened its doors to all, a decision that is seen as the catalyst that sparked the opening of temple doors all over the peninsula in the 1970s. However, these same years were also the time when interethnic tension between Tamils and Sinhalese was intensifying, so the

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Fig. 9.2  Veḷḷāḷar patronized Ā gamic village temple. (Photo by author)

specifics about temple entry in Jaffna quickly faded away into the background, mainly when the war erupted. Much of my field research was thus spent visiting the temples I was directed to by informants. One such temple I visited was a Māriyammaṉ26 kōvil that was important to a particular kirāmam (village) located on one of the peninsular islands that has a history of caste clashes (see Fig. 9.2). I call the village Veeranagar, the Brahmin priest27 Kailasasarma, and his wife, Ambalamma. Veeranagar is primarily a fishing village; fishers likely constitute the largest caste group but possibly not the majority, as there are large pluralities of Veḷḷāḷar and Paḷḷar inhabitants who live in distinct wards of the village. The temple is of modest size, but its land appears quite vast and faces the sea. When I visited the temple, I would often go on

 A non-Ā gamic version of the mother goddess.  While Māriyammaṉ temples are also run by non-Brahmin priests, this particular one was Veḷḷāḷar owned and Brahmin operated. 26 27

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weekdays in the middle of the afternoon when it is empty.28 This way, I had a chance to talk to Kailasasarma and Ambalamma alone without interrupting their duties. The board of trustees at this temple is unanimously of Veḷḷāḷar caste, in addition to most of the worshippers. People from the oppressed castes do not enter this temple. Ambalamma mentioned that both she and Kailasasarma do not mind if people from the oppressed castes enter the temple, but that the Veḷḷāḷar management opposes it. She explained that people from these castes worship the deity from outside the temple and that Kailasasarma goes outside to officiate worship for these patrons. She said that there is no official rule that they cannot enter, but if they did, they would likely face repercussions in the form of violence by the Veḷḷāḷars, as this temple had been the site of caste-based violence just before the war had started. During a temple festival almost forty years ago, a devotee from the Paḷḷar caste attempted to pull the te ̄r—the chariot the deity sits on that is communally pulled around the temple, temple grounds, or village. As a reaction, there was violent opposition by the Veḷḷāḷars, who ended up setting the tēr on fire. Since this incident, she said, the oppressed castes do not try to enter. When an outsider asks questions about the prevalence of caste discrimination to people in Jaffna of caste privilege, most will vehemently deny its existence, attributing it to be a thing of the past. This is predominantly the response in the Valikamam area, which is the most populated and central part of the Jaffna district, constituting the town, the main government offices, and the university. However, when a level of trust is established, and more focused questions are asked, the answers one receives are often not visible to the naked eye. Most of the conversations I had with other informants regarding temple entry were quite similar to the one with Ambalamma, especially in Jaffna’s areas outside Valikamam, including Thenmaradchi, Vadamaradchi, and the Jaffna islands. Despite the protests in 1968 and the subsequent opening of temple doors in the 1970s, temple entry is not universal in the Jaffna district, particularly in the rural areas (Thanges and Silva 2009). Individuals external to the local caste system may enter. Ambalamma mentioned that they get visits from the locally stationed Sinhalese Buddhist armed forces who offer worship. Still, Tamil Hindus from the oppressed castes may not and do not try to enter, and 28  Hindu temples are often closed in the afternoons, particularly on weekdays, from about 12:00 to 16:00. This may be due to a combination of the fact that many devotees are at their day jobs and that this timeframe is considered somewhat inauspicious.

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there is an element of self-restraint at play. Members from the Paḷḷar community in Veeranagar mentioned that it was not just the Māriyammaṉ kōvil but about five temples in the area that also restricted their entry. This self-restraint reveals a significant way in which caste was often erased or undermined. Most of those interviewed said they were Tamil first and their respective caste second and that interethnic oppression by the State was a more significant problem than intra-ethnic caste discrimination today. They said they did not want to provoke caste fights with the Veḷḷāḷars, especially since the north had finally seen some return to “normalcy”29 due to the end of the war. Bala, one of my interviewees, is a Pañcamar youth in his early twenties who lives in a section of Veeranagar that is occupied solely by members of his caste. This part of the village is poor. Many of the residents live in huts with no electricity or running water. This section of the village is close to the sea and a navy post. Though the war is over, residents discussed harassment and violence they continue to face at the hands of the nearby navy in the postwar militarized environment, including some allegations of sexual abuse. When asked about the Māriyammaṉ temple and its Veḷḷāḷar patrons across the village, Bala replied, “We don’t need to go to their temple—we have our own … why should we fight [with the Veḷḷāḷars] when the war is over? … They [navy] can also beat them [Veḷḷāḷars] as they beat us.” In this situation, we see the dual oppression Bala faces—by those of the dominant caste within his ethnic group and by the State’s armed forces that belong to the ethnic other. He, however, feels some sense of control over the oppression he faces at the hands of the Veḷḷāḷars by choosing not to enter what he deems as their space. The violence he may face by the navy, however, is more difficult to control. Furthermore, he finds some common ground with the Veḷḷāḷars along the lines of a shared ethnolinguistic grouping; he realizes that they, too, are susceptible to falling victim to the Sinhalese armed forces. Bala thus does not see temple entry as an immediate, priority issue for his community amidst the other political issues at play.

29  I use “normalcy” within quotes to bring attention to the fact that what is “normal” in postwar Tamil areas is not the same “normal” in other areas of the country. “Normal” to those interviewed meant the freedom of mobility without curfew restrictions, the availability of education and employment opportunities, the availability of the same products in shops and markets at the same prices as the rest of the country, and so on. There was still concern over the heavy military presence in the north, which was also linked to intimidation, harassment, and abuse both directly and indirectly experienced by inhabitants.

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The tendency to dismiss the relevance of caste, despite its continued relevance, was exemplified in the fact that the head trustee and manager of the Veeranagar temple is a Veḷḷāḷar who lives in Colombo. Kailasasarma and Ambalamma mentioned that he is relatively wealthy and had permanently relocated there with his family during the war. When asked why someone in Colombo was the head of a temple far away in rural Jaffna, they mentioned that this was a family tradition. Veeranagar was his ūr (village) where his family had managed the kōvil for generations. They stated that he was very particular in maintaining “traditions,” particularly the one that the castes formerly considered untouchable do not enter. Colombo, the country’s commercial capital, is a multicultural melting pot, where people from all ethnic and religious backgrounds live in close quarters. While there are demarcated spaces by ethnicity and class, there are no distinct wards in the city explicitly marked by caste, like in Jaffna’s villages. Temples in Colombo admit all people of all castes. The head trustee may perhaps lead a cosmopolitan life in the capital, where he may not know his neighbors’ caste or the person worshiping next to him at the local Hindu kōvil he may attend. Still, he will return to his ūr in Jaffna and be easily able to reposition himself back into the ways of local custom and convention, even if doing so is discriminatory and antiquated. While this study did not find any temples in Jaffna’s Valikamam area that restricted temple entry, caste discrimination was not absent at certain kōvils, particularly regarding roles and rituals that worshippers could perform during festivals. At one particular temple, informants mentioned an incident as late as 2011 where a member of an oppressed caste was denied the opportunity to pull the tēr at a tiruviḻā (temple festival). In an interview, a temple devotee I call Ram explained that after discussion with temple management, members of that particular caste community would be allowed to pull the tēr the following year. Similarly, a recurrent allegation in Valikamam and other areas of Jaffna, particularly at the prominent temples that opened their doors to oppressed castes post-1968, was that the chance to sponsor tiruviḻās and special pūjās (acts of worship) belonged almost exclusively to Veḷḷāḷars, given that they constituted the temple management and that the Jaffna Brahmins deferred to their policies. Some temples started to hold tiruviḻās over a series of days to appease these claims, with a day for each respective caste that constituted the temple patrons. Ram said that he found this insulting and recounted his experience attending one of these tiruviḻās. For one, the temple had officially labeled the festival “Paḷl ̣ar tiruviḻā” (with signage), which he found

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humiliating and triggering, reminiscent of the days when Veḷḷāḷars would derogatorily address Pañcamars by their respective caste names. He felt this overtly marked him and others in what he thought was an evolving Jaffna, where outward markers of caste were disappearing. Secondly, he found that because the festival was labeled “Paḷḷar tiruviḻā,” many non-­ Paḷḷars did not attend. Lastly, he thought that the rituals and pūjās conducted by the Brahmin priest were done in a very hasty manner with ample shortcuts taken, in contrast to how the same rituals were usually methodically and elaborately performed for Veḷḷāḷars. When these rituals were conducted for Veḷḷāḷars, he claimed they could draw closer to the deity than the Paḷḷars could. These examples allude to elements of untouchability. The pulling of the tēr is a process undertaken by multiple people simultaneously, all of whom grasp the rope together. A worshipper at the Nallur Kandasamy Kōvil— perhaps the most famous Hindu temple in Sri Lanka—mentioned that it was believed that just touching the rope of the tēr while it was being pulled could eliminate sins, which is essential for good karma. That people from certain castes are denied from participating in a collective process of worship in which they will come into physical contact with others, in addition to them being kept at a distance from the deity, highlights the persistence of caste-based physical segregation in the temple. However, as Bala mentioned, the oppressed castes also have their own temples run by their own pūcāris (see Fig. 9.3).30 These temples usually pay tribute to village deities. In Jaffna, these deities often take the forms of Vairavar, Murukaṉ, Māriyammaṉ, or Kāḷi, among others, and pūjās are localized and conducted exclusively in Tamil, with little to no Sanskrit recitation. As these temples are non-Ā gamic with non-Brahmin priests, animal sacrifice rituals are sometimes performed on special occasions. The non-Ā gamic kōvil, particularly those officiated by a Pañcamar pūcāri, is seemingly in a state of decline in Jaffna, contrary to neighboring Tamil Nadu where they exist in abundance, perhaps due to the South Indian state’s anti-Brahmin movements that did not exist in Sri Lanka.31 While the non-Ā gamic kōvils are most definitely frequented in caste-divided 30  Non-Brahmin priests, often presiding over non-Ā gamic temples dedicated to village deities. 31  Ambalavanar (2006, 392–393) attributes the decline to the efforts of Jaffna Caiva reformist Arumuga Navalar (1822–1879), who influenced the Sanskritized transformation of “large numbers” of Kaṇṇaki, Kāḷi, and Ammaṉ kōvils into orthodox Durga temples in the early twentieth century.

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Fig. 9.3  Pañcamar patronized non-Ā gamic village temple. (Photo by author)

rural villages like Veeranagar, where oppressed castes may not enter many Brahmanic temples, some villagers in Valikamam say these non-Ā gamic temples have been in existence just as long as the Ā gamic temples. Still, they receive less patronage than those with Brahmin priests and Sanskritized deities. An older woman I spoke to at a Paḷḷar patronized Murukan kōvil mentioned it is because many in their community now prefer the more prominent Ā gamic temples, which they have (mostly) had access to since the opening of temple doors. The Pañcamars’ non-Ā gamic kōvils are also not as well funded as Veḷḷāḷar-managed Brahminic temples or temples managed by other non-­ oppressed castes. Places of worship rely upon donations, which Pañcamar temples often do not have due to poverty in their communities. Veḷḷāḷar kōvils often have a heavy influx of foreign currency donations coming in from the Tamil diaspora. Some Pañcamars mentioned that many of their kin also go abroad but often cut ties with their ancestral villages. In Veeranagar, the pūcāri of a local Paḷḷar kōvil said that only the Eelam

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People’s Democratic Party (EPDP)32 had pledged funding. He mentioned that the ruling parliamentarians in power belonging to the Veḷḷāḷar-­ dominated Tamil National Alliance (TNA) pay very little or no attention to their concerns, making visits to Pañcamar wards of villages only when there is an upcoming election. We are thus returned to the recurrent theme of Veḷḷāḷar domination, which today affects the Pañcamar castes in a multitude of ways and works in symbiotic relation to the institution of the temple.

Conclusion This chapter has examined the caste system in transition during Sri Lanka’s civil war in the Jaffna peninsula, known to be the most caste-conscious and conservative district in the country, using ethnographic research from contemporary Hindu temple worship and interviews about life under militant rule. While temple worship and the LTTE may seem to have little in common, what binds these two topics together are efforts made within each institution to contest Veḷḷāḷar hegemony, which has traditionally been and continues to be at the epicenter of the Jaffna caste system, despite recent research showing that the Veḷḷāḷar population may no longer constitute a majority in the district (Paramsothy 2015). War and militancy, specifically the social policy on caste implemented by the LTTE, dramatically modified inter-caste interaction and eliminated overt forms of caste discrimination, enabling some Pañcamar castes to escape their previously constrained positions of subjugation. However, it did not eradicate caste prejudices or subtle forms of discrimination. Many of these modifications have carried over into this postwar period, such as the cessation in caste naming as verbal abuse and the transition to a mercantile system of business wherein certain oppressed castes no longer perform their labor at the homes of the dominant caste. However, this chapter has also shown how various discriminatory practices have resurfaced concerning contemporary temple worship, such as restricting particular castes from entry at certain 32  The EPDP is a paramilitary and political party that opposed the LTTE. During the war, they were linked to a number of disappearances and killings in the north. They tend to be unpopular with most Tamils and have faced criticism for being a part of former President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s ruling United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA) during the war in 2009, which is seen as Sinhala nationalist and anti-Tamil, especially due to the government’s role in ending the war by killing thousands of Tamil civilians en masse.

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rural Ā gamic kōvils, perhaps since caste practice and discrimination are no longer monitored and policed after the destruction of the LTTE. Theoretically, what this chapter has attempted to advocate for is a different vantage point in examining caste. Latour (2005, 32) writes, [I]t is so important not to define in advance what sort of social aggregates could provide the context for all these maps. Group delineation is not only one of the occupations of social scientists, but also the very constant task of the actors themselves. Actors do the sociology for the sociologists and sociologists learn from the actors what makes up their set of associations.

Latour suggests that our job as researchers is to follow the actors and their associations without presuppositions, particularly if empirical evidence suggests otherwise. Caste studies are often India-centric and make analyses using varṇa to establish hierarchy. As varṇa itself was imposed upon the category of caste by colonial officials, it is time scholars decolonize approaches to caste studies by breaking down these simplistic and presumptive paradigms and start afresh, creating more nuanced models that conceptualize the contemporary manifestations of caste with their appropriate social, political, and historical contexts. As this chapter has shown, while caste can be rigid and static, it evolves slowly based on local cultural dynamics. The ontological reality of caste manifestation on the ground in each region, country, and locality will differ based on inter-caste interaction. While the ethnographic case studies in this chapter have illuminated how caste domination is perpetuated and contested in a small part of the Indian subcontinent largely devoid of Brahmins, this study articulates that one must interrogate and reorient notions of caste hierarchy, particularly in the circumstances of migration, conflict, and political change.

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CHAPTER 10

Experiencing the City as Workers: The Spatial Practices of Women Beauty and Retail Workers in Karachi, Pakistan Sidra Kamran

In the past two decades, new malls, department stores, cafés, and beauty salons have proliferated across urban Pakistan. These spaces provide new opportunities of work and leisure for women in a context where women are typically restricted to domestic spaces. In Karachi—a city long characterized by violence, spatial segregation, and gendered restrictions on mobility—beauty and retail workplaces are rare urban spaces in which working-class women from different neighborhoods, ethnicities, and I am grateful to Smitha Radhakrishnan, Gowri Vijayakumar, Rachel Sherman, Natasha Ansari, and Sneha Annavarapu for their feedback on this chapter. This research was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, and the Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies at The New School.

S. Kamran (*) Department of Sociology, New School for Social Research, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Radhakrishnan, G. Vijayakumar (eds.), Sociology of South Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97030-7_10

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religions regularly congregate for purposes of work. In this chapter, I analyze how women beauty and retail workers experience the city as workers through these spaces. Scholarship on urban life has usually focused on residential areas such as neighborhoods, gated communities, and ghettos or public spaces such as parks, streets, markets, and squares. Workplaces are regularly omitted from these analyses. In fact, public spaces are typically considered in opposition to the workplace and the home as spaces where people spend time without a specific role or purpose. Public spaces are seen as spaces where people engage in pleasure, uncommodified conviviality, political activity, and associational life with strangers and friends (Khalili 2016; Oldenburg and Brissett 1982; Parikh 2019). In contrast to public spaces, the workplace and the home (particularly for women) are considered private spaces marked by control, surveillance, and work pressures. When workplaces, such as shopping malls and markets, are included in analyses of urban life, the focus remains on consumers rather than workers. Scholars of work likewise focus on customer-worker interactions in bounded workplaces, rather than situating these workplaces in relation to broader urban life. In this chapter, I draw together scholarship on work and urban life to make a case for considering the workplace as a type of urban space that is critical to the production of broader urban life. Such a framing is important because it draws into focus urban relations and activities that are otherwise obscured when workplaces are excluded in analyses of city life. Building on critiques of the public-private binary and foregrounding the multiplicity of space, I show how the otherwise “private” space of the workplace enables experiences associated with “public” life, especially for women in Karachi who have little to no access to spaces besides the home and work. Drawing on ethnographic observation in two workplaces— Meena Bazaar (a women-only traditional bazaar) and Delight (a contemporary mixed-gender department store)—and interviews with women workers in these workplaces and other beauty parlors, stores, and malls in Karachi, I explore women beauty and retail workers’ spatial practices. These workers work long hours for low pay in exploitative conditions. Yet, I find that these workplaces allow women to experience a version of what public spaces are meant to provide and the patriarchal space of the home denies: pleasure, freedom, and the opportunity to craft new identities and relations.

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Patriarchal norms and poor infrastructure in Pakistan prevent women across social classes from freely participating in public spaces, and working-class women have particularly limited access to spaces beyond work and home. Despite low female labor force participation, workplaces, and in some cases vocational training centers or shrines, are rare spaces of urban working-class women’s participation in the public sphere (Ali 2012; Kirmani 2020; Viqar 2018). Workplaces are not adequate substitutes for uncommodified and unregulated public spaces. Yet analyzing how workplaces enable public life reveals an arena of urban life that is overlooked if the focus remains on typical public spaces such as parks, streets, promenades, and so on. In the case of Pakistan, such a framing illuminates the social lives of a section of working-class women. My research suggests that we need to understand ideas of “publicness” as varying across different subject positions. Experience of space is necessarily shaped by complex inequalities and, relatedly, exclusion from and inclusion in other spaces. In the case of the beauty and retail workers with whom I spent time, women’s movements in the city for work were entangled in their movements in the city for fun; women inhabited the workplace in both “productive” and “non-productive” ways. In doing so, they experienced the pleasure and expanded sociality typically associated with public spaces through their work, despite harsh working conditions and managerial control. Given women’s limited access to other spaces in the city, workplaces gained additional salience as spaces of fun and sociality. Focusing on women’s experiences of the city through workplaces allows us to make room for working-class women in contemporary debates on mobility, urban life, and pleasure.

The Thwarted Promise of Public Space Scholars have long argued that public spaces regularly exclude certain groups and rarely exist as free and equal spaces (Fraser 1990; Ryan 1992). However, feminist and right to the city movements continue to center the demand for access to public spaces because, despite their limitations, such spaces can and do offer opportunities for uncommodified conviviality (Khalili 2016), unscripted political activity (Kohn 2004), rational debate (Habermas 1991), sexual freedom and pleasure (Wilson 1992), interactions with strangers (Simmel 1903), and self-making projects that are otherwise stifled in spaces of home and work. Women, in particular, can use the anonymity of being in public to craft new identities and experience

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joys, which the patriarchal spaces of home and community often forbid (Kirmani 2020). Nevertheless, the promise of public space for women is characterized by a double bind. In practice, gendered exclusions, sexual violence, and stigma often prevent women from taking advantage of the leisure and freedom enabled by such spaces (Phadke et al. 2011). In Pakistan, women’s presence in the public sphere is particularly stigmatized, as notions of respectable femininity are predicated on sexual modesty and, relatedly, women’s primary devotion to domesticity (Kamran 2021). Women’s pursuit of respectability often leads them to avoid public spaces but also to use them in unexpected ways. For example, Krishnan (2020) explains why young women in India often engage in private sex acts and kissing in public, rather than private spaces. Engaging in intimate acts in public spaces allows women to retain control over the meaning of such acts in front of their partners and parents and retain “respectability” in a way that renting a private room does not. It also offers them a chance to experience intimacy while remaining anonymous, and hence, escaping allegations of disrespectability. Of course, young lovers’ lack of unstigmatized access to private spaces (most women live in strict hostels or with their families and renting a private room can be expensive, dangerous, and disreputable) contributes to their reliance on “secluded” public spaces for romantic adventures. Sometimes, the expansion of “safe” public spaces— which are less secluded and more family oriented—may actually impinge on women’s freedom to engage in such illicit romantic encounters, even if it enables other possibilities for women’s participation in urban life (Annavarapu 2018). Such research shows that women’s experiences of space are ultimately shaped by their gendered access to, or exclusion from, other spaces and broader gender norms. Considering these multiple meanings and uses of space, rather than assuming that workplaces pre-exist these practices as either public or private spaces associated with designated activities (Harvey 2010; Lefebvre 1991; Massey 1994), I analyze workers’ spatial practices and relations as producing space. Specifically, I develop a relational account of space by emphasizing that working-class women’s specific subject positions, as excluded from other public spaces, contribute to their experience of workplaces as an alternative to traditional public spaces.

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Moving Beyond the Public-Private Binary Thinking of spaces in rigid terms of private and public is inaccurate, Eurocentric, and analytically unproductive. Not only do people mean different things when they use the labels of public and private (Weintraub 1997), but what is considered public or private changes over time and across context (Gal 2002; Kumar 1997). Further, as feminist scholarship has argued, the public and the private are co-constituted, and the public-­ private binary is itself an ideological construct (McClintock 1995; Pateman and Phillips 1987; Ray and Qayum 2009). Thus, rejecting this binary of private-public, scholars have empirically demonstrated that the “publicness” of spaces is not a fixed attribute but, rather, varies according to different times of the day, situations, religious differences, kinship practices, and specific histories and cultures that characterize neighborhoods (Abraham 2010; Desai 2007). In Pakistan, as Gazdar (2003, 3) writes, “the division of space is not determined in strictly dual ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres, but there are gradations between these two polar positions. The gradations correspond with different levels of social—in effect familial—proximity or distance.” For example, women may move freely not just in their homes but also in the goth (village) or neighborhood, which becomes an extension of the domestic space by virtue of being populated by women’s kin group (Gazdar 2003; Verkaaik 2009). Concepts such as “portable seclusion” (Papanek 1971), “mobile homes” (Abu-Lughod 2002), and “patriarchal accommodations” (Andrews and Shahrokni 2014) that refer to veiling and women-only spaces effectively destabilize a rigid public/private binary by indicating how veiling and segregation, which are otherwise associated with domesticity and the private sphere, can enhance women’s access to public life too. Such framings allow us to move away from the ideal of public space as a space of “unfettered individual mobility” and instead, to capture the heterogeneous spatial practices of women, even when gender and class norms obstruct their access to public spaces (Viqar 2018). In this chapter, I embrace the multiplicity of space and the idea of “gradations” rather than a binary between public and private. This allows me to trace how women navigate exclusions, rather than ignoring women’s participation in spaces that are not considered truly “public” spaces, such as workplaces.

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The Workplace as an In-Between Space Although a range of spaces such as malls, marketplaces, cafés, and taxi cabs have been analyzed as semi-public, hybrid, or in-between spaces (Annavarapu 2021; Phadke et  al. 2011; Pratt 2017), the workplace is rarely examined as lying on the continuum of the public-private binary. Workplaces are indeed constrained by managerial oversight and severe discipline and are not accessible to all. Yet, they often provide a central platform for associational life in increasingly segregated cities (Estlund 2003). Moreover, as Peiss (1986) notes, the division between leisure and work established under industrial capitalism rarely operates the same way for women as it does for men. Leisure is not necessarily an autonomous sphere from work or household labor for women. To what extent, then, can we consider women’s workplaces as “in-between” spaces that also serve the role typically associated with public spaces? Research in urban studies, especially in the Global South, has explored malls and marketplaces as emergent public spaces but focuses on the experiences of consumers, rather than workers, in these spaces (Abaza 2001; Bagheri 2014; Erkip 2003). Similarly, previous research on service work often examines workplaces as bounded spaces of production-­consumption, rather than analyzing how workers’ lives in workplaces relate to urban life more broadly (Hanser 2008; Sherman 2007; Williams 2006). Recent studies on service work in South Asia, however, increasingly examine women workers’ mobility and pleasure in the city in relation to their status as workers (Islam 2020; Krishnamurthy 2018; Parikh 2019). Indeed, interactive service workplaces offer new nodes of sociality with customers and co-workers that must be further analyzed. However, such workplaces also share several characteristics with industrial workplaces; both are a conduit to self-worth, sociality, fun, and enhanced mobility, despite being sites of exploitative labor (Dutta 2020; Hewamanne 2008; Lynch 2007; Sharma and Kunduri 2016). Building on these studies of both service and industrial work, I make a case for including workplaces as in-between spaces crucial to the production of broader urban life. Research on women’s mobility in Pakistan shows that patriarchal and infrastructural constraints heavily restrict women’s participation in the public sphere. Consequently, women have little access to conventional public spaces such as promenades, parks, and squares (Anwar et al. 2018; Kirmani 2020; Masood 2018; Ring 2006; Sayeed and Ansari 2019; Viqar 2018). Working-class women, in particular, have comparatively limited

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access to or time for spaces of leisure in the city, as they must do both household and paid work and, unlike middle-class women, do not have the class status that can ensure respectability alongside participation in the public sphere (Khurshid 2015; Radhakrishnan 2009). Additionally, the decline of mohalla (neighborhood) culture in Karachi (Verkaaik 2009) has further isolated women in domestic spaces. Although most of this research has focused on residential areas, labor force participation, spaces of leisure, and transport, rather than workplaces, Ali’s (2012) research on women factory workers in Karachi foregrounds the significance of workplaces in enabling a life, no matter how fraught, outside the home. Female labor force participation remains exceedingly low, and a significant number of working-class women have families that do not allow them to work outside their homes at all (Sayeed and Ansari 2019). However, new options of work in the service economy are drawing women out of their homes and into the labor force. In such a context, the workplace becomes a crucial in-between space that enables a rare locus of public life for working-class women, ultimately shaping their encounter with the city.

Methods Karachi is Pakistan’s most cosmopolitan city, but decades of political and ethnic conflict, military operations, Islamization, economic insecurity, and resulting violence have introduced deep-seated divisions in the city, gutted the social infrastructure of neighborhoods, and intensified restrictions on women’s mobility. In such a context, large interactive service workplaces are rare spaces that draw together women from different ethnic, geographical, and class backgrounds for sustained periods of time. Unlike industrial workplaces in Karachi, which tend to recruit women from nearby settlements, these workplaces employ a more diverse group of women workers. In this chapter, I examine two such workplaces in detail, Meena Bazaar and Delight, and draw on observations in other beauty and retail workplaces as well.1 The data analyzed in this chapter was gathered during 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Karachi in 2018–2019, in addition to 80 semi-structured interviews conducted with beauty workers, retail workers, and managers during 2016–2020. I spent most of my time in Meena 1

 I have used pseudonyms for the department store and beauty and retail workers I discuss.

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Bazaar and Delight but also visited other types of bazaars, malls, salons, and stores in the city. I attended two trainings for Brand Ambassadors who work for high-end brands and also interviewed third-party contractors who recruited retail workers for mid-range brands. Meena Bazaar is a unique women-only marketplace in Karachi consisting almost exclusively of either beauty parlors or small undergarments shops. Only women customers and workers are allowed inside the bazaar, with the exception of a male manager and a few salesmen who are allowed inside for a couple of designated hours. The bazaar is on the first floor of a large mixed-gender market, and shops open out directly into the alleyways. During its heyday, the bazaar was a renowned center for beauty services in the city. However, with the arrival of new beauty salons and retail sites, the bazaar now caters to working-class and lower-middle-class customers in addition to its old base of middle-class customers. Workers in the bazaar came from a range of places in the city and were as young as 13 to as old as 60+ years. Some were wage workers, whereas others were self-­ employed shopkeepers. A significant number of women workers were divorced, single, widowed, or separated. I spent seven months in the bazaar conducting participant observation. For the first two months, I took beauty classes at one salon in Meena Bazaar and worked for a week during the Eid season when I had my own clients. For the remaining time, I sat in various shops chatting with customers and workers, helping women run errands inside and outside of the bazaar, and conducting informal interviews during the working day. I also visited some women in their homes for formal interviews and participated in leisure activities with them in the city and in their homes. The second workplace I analyze is Delight, a mixed-gender department store that was established a few years ago and is part of a local franchise. The store hired both men and women retail workers, and all workers were wage workers. This department store is part of a new landscape of retail in Pakistan known as Local Modern Trade, which is slowly drawing customers away from small, neighborhood stores and traditional markets to large department stores. It is brightly lit, air-conditioned, and stocks a range of non-grocery items including make-up, clothes, and household goods. Studies of malls in South Asia have argued that malls, unlike markets, exclude working-class customers (Voyce 2007). Although this is true of internationally owned department stores and high-end malls in Karachi, mid-range department stores like Delight source significantly cheaper goods (either imported from China or manufactured locally) that

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working-class consumers can afford. Thus, both Delight and Meena Bazaar somewhat transcend the class segregation that characterizes elite retail spaces and traditional markets. I spent four months working in the store part-time and for three or four days a week. I spent the first six weeks in a cordoned off women-only area dedicated to selling lingerie and the rest of my time in an open area that sold low-end cosmetics. In addition to that, I interviewed retail workers in their homes, spent time with them outside the store during lunch breaks, and interviewed management of the store. Throughout my time in these two workplaces, I observed women’s spatial practices at work, during lunch breaks, traveling to work, and moving in the city to run errands or visit restaurants. I interviewed women about their movements in the city and experiences at work by asking them about their friends (at work and otherwise), how often they met them and where, which areas in the city they were familiar with, their experiences of traveling in the city, how their lives had changed since they started working outside their homes, and why they started working. A combination of ethnography and semi-structured interviews allowed me to observe them in spaces that I was able to share with them and also collect information about their experiences in other spaces in the city that I did not have direct access to.

Findings In this section, I first show how workplaces functioned as rare spaces of self-transformation, sociality, and fun in the lives of women beauty and retail workers. Women were able to produce moments of freedom by exploiting the gaps between home-discipline and work-discipline. I then discuss how women and their families made an exception for women’s travel to workplaces and how workplaces served as a launching pad for women’s access to other spaces in the city. Lastly, I briefly note how workplaces were also marked by domesticity and that women mobilized the ideas of public and private in diverse ways in relation to the workplace, hence contributing to the “in-betweenness” of workplaces. Managerial control contributes to, and benefits from, this in-betweenness of space, but I do not discuss that here. Similarly, I do not focus extensively on harsh working conditions and discuss these aspects elsewhere in my research. Where relevant I refer to other studies of work to highlight parallel findings. I also note some differences between Meena Bazaar and

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Delight as well as between interactive service and industrial workplaces. I include these comparisons to note the unique ways that each workplace enables participation in urban life. Despite these differences, however, parallel findings suggest that a range of workplaces can be studied as spaces that are crucial to the production of urban life. The Workplace as a Rare Space Outside the Home The majority of beauty and retail workers I spoke to rarely spent time in typical public spaces such as parks, squares, and cafés. When they did visit these spaces, it was usually with their families, co-workers, or boyfriends, and not on their own or with non-work friends. When I asked Mariam, a beauty worker in her 20s who worked in a small neighborhood salon, if she ever spent time in other spaces in the city, she replied, No, no, there’s nothing here like this at all. It’s not as if we’re going out with our close friends on Sundays, having parties, or going out for breakfast with them. Our families would kill us if we did that (scoffs). They don’t let us go at all, it’s not allowed, let me tell you friend, not at all. I got permission to work here with great difficulty. And even then, I’m only allowed to work here because this area is close to my home. I don’t have permission to venture out of this area because the situation in the city isn’t safe. How will I come and go in a bus in a city like this? I’m only allowed to come here. I’m not even allowed to visit my friends’ homes. I come here in a rickshaw at 12 pm and then my brother picks me up at seven or eight in the evening and takes me home.

Mariam’s response condensed several reasons why working-class women often had no access to urban spaces besides their workplaces. One, families constrained women’s mobility outside their homes to secure the moral reputation of women and their families. Two, families worried about violence in the city and maintained that the city was not a safe space, especially for women. Several of the older women I interviewed shared that although they moved freely in the city when they were younger, they did not allow their daughters similar mobility today since they considered the city dangerous. Three, a class distinction undergirded women’s access to public spaces in Karachi. Mariam implicitly compared her situation to elite and middle-­ class women who were more likely to spend time outside their homes for

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leisure. Although women of all classes faced restrictions on mobility and stigma for participation in public spaces, women from privileged backgrounds were better positioned to overcome these barriers. They could frequent upscale cafés and malls where women’s presence was considered more acceptable, work in higher-status jobs to offset the stigma of working outside the home, and access the city through educational pursuits. Most beauty and retail workers worked six days a week, often ten or more hours a day, and did both household and waged work. Working-class women had neither the economic, cultural, and symbolic capital nor the free time required to frequent spaces of leisure in the city. A minority of beauty and retail workers I met did have a social life in their neighborhoods, but this depended on the type of neighborhood they lived in. Women socialized more easily in homogeneous neighborhoods. But, as scholars have noted, homogeneity can also curtail certain kinds of movements, because extended kin networks surveil women’s movements in such neighborhoods (Kirmani 2020; Sayeed and Ansari 2019; Sharma and Kunduri 2016). Often, women’s neighborhood relations were truncated because they changed neighborhoods after marriage or shuttled between various rented homes. Restrictions on women’s mobility made it nearly impossible for women to retain ties with friends who no longer lived in the same locale as them. Although a few workers kept in touch with old friends using mobile phones, long-term relationships on the phone between old friends were uncommon. Women frequently lost their friends’ numbers when they changed phones, and several had to give up their phones or use them sparingly once they were married to appease husbands and in-laws who disapproved of women chatting with friends. In this context, women’s workplaces were rare spaces besides their homes where they consistently spent time and had sustained encounters with people other than their families. The Workplace as a Space of Self-transformation Despite managerial control, workplaces also became rare spaces of personal autonomy and allowed women to develop a side of themselves that was curtailed at home. Beauty and retail workers clearly articulated how they had become more confident and intelligent, developed “speaking power,” and learned new skills to navigate the world since they started working. They frequently showed off these skills by teaching me the ropes and correctly predicting if customers would buy a lot, only browse through

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the aisles, or try and shoplift. Sayeed and Ansari (2019) find that teachers, factory workers, and home-based workers in working-class neighborhoods in Karachi similarly appreciated gaining shaoor (consciousness) and increased mobility via work. Ruby, who was a young beauty worker in training at Meena Bazaar, described her self-transformation to me: Just imagine, before I started work, I never had permission to go here and there. My parents had completely stifled me. I was only allowed to go from my home to the roof and back. I didn’t know the route to go anywhere in the city or do anything. I’m the first woman in my family who’s ventured outside her home. The other day I took my younger sister shopping and she said to me, “Wow, you were able to talk to the shopkeeper so well, I could never do that!” She still can’t talk to shopkeepers, you know!

Ruby hated her home and loved having a reason to leave it, but she also detested her boss. Many workers, like Ruby, bristled at the discipline enforced at both home and work and got into trouble with management. Yet, they were aware and proud of how work had transformed them. Although the workplace was not a utopian escape from control, it provided an opportunity to craft identities that the home neither allowed nor enabled. Unmarried women and those in unhappy homes and marriages were more likely to think of work as an escape, but even those in happy homes welcomed work as a distraction in a sometimes uneventful and stressful domestic life. Given that women had very little access to other forms of leisure, workplaces became key avenues for escaping familial tensions and unending household tasks. Zehra, an unmarried beauty worker in an upscale salon, explained: Whenever I get very tired, I wish for two days off from work. But then, when we do get three days off for Eid, by the third day I’m so bored that I start saying I want to go to work tomorrow. There are so many tasks to do at home, it’s non-stop! Ok fine, that’s not a big problem, that’s inevitable, we’ll always have to do housework, but we get bored at home. When I come to work, it’s a different part of my life. For example, I talk to a client, or a client is happy with my work, and I feel good about it. It’s not necessary that they give me a tip. Even if they simply praise me or remember my name, I feel good.

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For Zehra, work was an escape from boredom and a space that bolstered her self-esteem. The majority of women I spoke to hope to eventually quit their jobs (either after marriage or if they became economically secure). Yet, even these women, like women workers in other industrial and service workplaces (Dutta 2020; Islam 2020; Sayeed and Ansari 2019; Sharma and Kunduri 2016), articulated how paid work outside the home provided valuable skills, a sense of worth, and an escape from domesticity. The Workplace as a Space of Fun and Sociality Although both Meena Bazaar and Delight offered several opportunities for laughter, camaraderie, and play, they did so in different ways. Workers in Delight had little time to relax, as they confronted a tough managerial regime and a steady flow of customers. They were required to stand for the entire duration of their shifts, constantly surveilled, and barred from using their phones. When there were fewer customers, workers often had to manage and organize the stock and display. In Meena Bazaar, on the other hand, workers could sit, use their phones, and even nap if the market was slow. When the bazaar was busy, women engaged in long hours of physically demanding work, but the decline in customers in recent years and the rhythms of beauty work meant that women had slow periods in the market. In the absence of men, women thrived in a relaxed manner that they were unlikely to exhibit in mixed-gender spaces. They teased each other, laughed riotously, relaxed, and engaged in transgressive humor with greater abandon than the workers at Delight, where bodily discipline was much stricter. On the other hand, workers in Delight had more opportunities than workers in Meena Bazaar to interact and flirt with men and go out for lunch and tea breaks with their co-workers, and hence, have fun of a different kind. Beauty and retail workers in a range of workplaces used phrases such as “dil laga rahta ha” (we stay happy and busy) and “timepass ho jata ha” (time passes at work) to describe their time at work. “Timepass” is a word used in South Asia to denote unproductive activity, and young men frequently do “timepass” in public spaces. Women workers’ use of “timepass” in relation to their work demonstrates the blurred boundaries between work and play and draws a parallel between the public spaces where men “timepass” and the workplace where women “timepass” (Islam 2020). Sania, who worked at Delight, similarly explained, “When there are no customers, then we do tafreeh.” Tafreeh is an Urdu word which

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means fun, entertainment, and leisure, and usually refers to outdoor activities such as dining out, roaming around, and traveling. In this case, Sania used it as shorthand for having fun and fooling around at work, making the workplace the site of tafreeh. As Kirmani (2020) finds in her research on women in Lyari (a working-class neighborhood of Karachi), since women face strict restrictions at home, “fun” is often only possible in spaces outside the home. Even though managerial attempts to curtail sociality and fun at work tormented the workers, the workplace became the dominant site of fun in their lives and thus an alternative to traditional public spaces such as parks, cinemas, and cafés, from which women were excluded. Work-based networks allowed women opportunities for interaction with strangers and provided emotional and, on occasion, financial support of various kinds. Interactive service workplaces, unlike industrial workplaces, also became spaces to meet and have fun with ex-co-workers and friends or acquaintances who did not work there. Meena Bazaar, in particular, offered workers and self-employed shopkeepers the opportunity to meet with their friends for hours on end. Many women who did not work at the bazaar nevertheless came to the bazaar every day to spend time with their friends who worked there. In Delight, the spatial layout and strict managerial regime prohibited such sustained encounters. However, on several occasions, I saw women workers connecting with their old friends, ex-colleagues, and neighborhood acquaintances who would drop by both to shop and to chat briefly with the women they knew who worked there. Women consumers, whose mobility was also restricted unless for purposes of work or errands, were able to catch up with their friends who worked in beauty and retail spaces while doing errands, such as shopping for their families or getting beauty services. Since they rarely visited these friends in their homes because of lack of time and permission from their families, such service workplaces were the only zones of encounter. If women stopped working, they often lost the opportunity to meet their friends. A few months after I finished my participant observation at Delight, I met Maham, who had recently quit her job at Delight and was looking for another job. Maham told me to meet her at another department store where she had briefly worked before Delight. When I found her in the store, she was wearing a stylish jacket and heavy make-up as if she had come to a party. We sat down to chat in a nearby juice shop and she brought along her best friend Sara, another retail worker also looking for a job. It had been two weeks since they both quit their jobs, which was

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the last day they had met. Sara was not allowed to leave her home, but her father had allowed her to go out with Maham today for a job interview at another store. Maham and Sara had made a whole day of it by first going to the job interview and then going around to different stores to meet other retail workers they knew. A few minutes into our conversation Sara left to meet her boyfriend. Maham was ecstatic to be reunited with her friend and they were both keen to find a job at the same store so that their separation could come to an end. What was on the face of it a job interview became a happy day-long social event for Maham and Sara. Similar to women workers in other service and industrial workplaces (Benson 1987; Dutta 2020), even if workers disliked their work, they cherished the strong emotional ties with some of their co-workers who were often their only non-kin friends. Exploiting the Gap Between Work-Discipline and Home-Discipline Although families and employers disciplined workers at home and at work, work-discipline did not neatly map onto home-discipline, and women quickly learned to exploit the gaps between the two. One day I went earlier than usual to Meena Bazaar so I could talk to Noreen and Anita, two young beauty workers who were responsible for opening the salon, before the managers and senior workers arrived. When I arrived, Noreen was on the phone beaming with happiness and chatting away with her boyfriend while cleaning the counters and putting things away. The three of us then walked down to the tea shop in the main market to get anda paratha for breakfast. She stayed on the call and every now and then interrupted her conversation to tease us but, for the most part, ignored us. I tried to engage Anita as we walked down to the market but soon realized that she was also more interested in texting with her boyfriend and was replying to me only intermittently. My plan of getting uninterrupted time with Noreen and Anita was foiled, and we barely talked to each other as we waited for our breakfast at the tea stall. Noreen lived in a two-bedroom flat with her parents, two brothers, and three sisters. She slept in the same room as her mother and sisters and had no opportunity to talk to her boyfriend at home, since her parents strictly prohibited any interactions with men. Thus, she took advantage of this interlude before other workers arrived to talk to her boyfriend. Most of the young retail and beauty

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workers I encountered during my fieldwork were similarly restricted in what they could do, and not do, while they were at home. Workers also encountered patriarchal and managerial discipline at the workplace, but the workplace allowed them moments of “freedom” that the home did not and vice versa. At home, Noreen was exempt from doing household tasks because she was the working woman of the family, and her sister and mother made her breakfast and did the household work. At work, Noreen was constantly made to do the most menial tasks. The home provided freedom from such menial work, and the workplace provided another kind of freedom: the freedom to chat with her boyfriend. As Islam (2020, 8) notes in research on women service workers in India, employment allowed women to “negotiate, if not entirely reject, expectations of domesticity.” Women also made use of the temporal gap between home-discipline and work-discipline as they moved between home and work. During this time, women could be unaccounted for. Some husbands, brothers, and fathers insisted on picking and dropping women to work, but many women used public transport. I regularly saw women in Meena Bazaar dressing up at the end of the working day for their shopping plans with their boyfriends. Sometimes, retail and beauty workers pretended to go to work on their off days but spent that time with friends and boyfriends. For example, the night before Eid when workers typically worked until 5 am or later, Sara made a big show of insisting that she was not allowed to work past 3 am by her family and must return home. She left early, giving up a sizable bonus. At around 5 am, I got a frantic call from her. She had left a bag at the bazaar and wanted me to keep it for her till she returned to pick it up. Although she had hidden this from me earlier, she now shared that she had been out with her fiancé these past few hours while having told her parents that she was meant to work at the salon till 5 am. Like the women workers in call centers in India that Parikh (2019) describes, retail and beauty workers in Karachi “stretched” their time between home and work to accommodate leisure. In doing so, they found a way to have fun while “using spaces within the bounds of accepted social norms to their own advantage” (Kirmani 2020, 325). The Workplace as an Exceptional Space In contrast to other spaces in the city, the workplace was the one space that was considered somewhat “legitimate” for women to spend time in. Both

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women and their families thus treated the workplace as an exceptional space and suspended the rules and practices they otherwise employed when navigating the city for reasons besides work. For example, women adopted a set of spatial practices en route to work and at work that they did not replicate when accessing other spaces in the city. Sumera, a beauty worker, lived an hour away from Meena Bazaar and usually arrived home very late, often close to midnight. During fieldwork, I spent a night at her home. On the bus on the way home, Sumera regaled me with stories of her commute. She shared that robbers regularly robbed passengers on this bus, and one day, after she witnessed a robbery a few days in a row, she lost her temper at the robbers, hit one of them with her handbag, and shamed them for robbing working-class people who were returning home after a hard and honest day of work. Her family became used to her arriving home late and traveling at night. In 2012, when a huge fire erupted at a factory in the city, it took her several hours at night to get home, and she had no way of informing her family of her whereabouts. Despite these hardships, she was unfazed by her long and dangerous commute. Yet, Sumera did not extend this bravado to her movements in the city, besides for work or errands. The next morning, Sumera introduced me to her teenage nephew who lived with her and told me she was upset with him. A few days ago, she had asked him to accompany her to a neighbor’s home, but he had refused, saying that if she can go to Meena Bazaar alone every day he does not see why she cannot go to her neighbor’s home. I responded saying that I agreed with him and was surprised that she was not willing to walk alone in her neighborhood. She laughed it off saying that it was not the same as going to work. Women like Sumera who worked in low-status jobs were already stigmatized for working outside the home, especially in a low-status occupation. While participation in the public sphere for work was unavoidable, women hoped to approximate practices of respectable femininity, such as avoiding going out alone, whenever they could. Younger male cousins, brothers, sisters, and parents commonly chaperoned women to co-workers’ weddings, homes, and “outings” such as picnics and dinners. For example, Hiba, who was in her early 30s, had been working at a beauty parlor in Meena Bazaar for several years and was now in a managerial position. On her birthday, she proposed that a few of us go to a new upscale mall to celebrate and insisted that I first meet her at her home so the two of us could go together. When I suggested she meet me

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directly at the mall, as it was almost the same route (and time) she took to work every day, she just shrugged and said, “No, but going to work is a different thing. If you can’t meet me here, I’ll just bring my sister with me.” Hiba, like many other women, never traveled anywhere alone in the city besides to and from work and did not want to, either. Many women did break these rules regarding chaperones to frequent malls, visit their friends (typically made through work), and go out with their boyfriends, whereas several women did not have their family’s permission to travel alone at all, even to their workplaces. Overall, a significant proportion of women and their families continued to, and were often forced to, grant the workplace a privileged status, which called for a different set of rules and behaviors. This, in turn, allowed women an opportunity to move in the city alone to go to work and, as I show below, to take advantage of these unchaperoned moments as they went to and from work. The Workplace as a Launching Pad The workplace provided a space for public life within the confines of the workplace, but it also served as a conduit to other urban public spaces such as restaurants, roadside tea stalls, and beaches. These spaces became “satellite” public spaces that, although separate from the workplace, were loosely tied to the workplace in a changing configuration; women only accessed these public spaces through an initial connection to the workplace. For example, retail workers at Delight regularly went for lunch breaks and tea breaks to nearby restaurants and tea stalls. The month of Ramzan was filled with such excursions. Workers usually went out for a long break for iftari (the meal that marks the end of the daily fast) in the evening and then took another shorter break later in the night. During one of these breaks, we went to have milkshakes and sat outside on the street on benches next to the milkshake stall around midnight. Although these retail workers were not intentionally reclaiming public spaces, as feminists who advocate for loitering at dhabas (roadside restaurants) do, they were participating in eroding gender norms by frequenting such spaces in women-only groups, late at night, and with their friends rather than their families—although, notably, never alone. Women were also on friendly terms with the male restaurant owners and servers and relaxed, spoke, joked, and rested in restaurants they regularly visited in an uninhibited way, which was atypical of women’s otherwise restrained behavior in public spaces.

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Both need and desire shaped women’s participation in such public spaces. Delight did not provide a break room or lunch, and women had to go out during the working day to eat if they wanted to avoid eating in a cramped kitchen overrun with cockroaches. Women also used the cover of work to venture out into the city to have fun after work, despite the fact that they worked long hours and were chastised by their families for arriving home late and working in the first place. Thus, I was surprised when Hina, a worker at Delight and mother of two, suggested that we all go to have fish fry after the late-night shift at work. The manager insisted that we stay late to sort out stock and we did not leave work till 11 pm. When we arrived, the five of us sat out on a table on the sidewalk in the cool air and were the only women at the roadside restaurant. Arfa’s brother sat several tables away from us with a friend. He had come to pick Arfa up from work but had agreed to wait till she was done with dinner with us. Arfa’s husband was extremely possessive and abusive, and although she was worried about getting home late, she knew she could just say that she had to stay at the store late today. Rehana, a beauty worker at Meena Bazaar, was in a similarly abusive marriage and frequently used the excuse of work to go on picnics with work friends. Thus, the workplace provided a somewhat legitimate cover under which women smuggled moments of joy, sociality, and leisure. In comparison to women workers at Delight, workers in Meena Bazaar were relatively restrained in their movements in the city for pleasure as they, or their families, prioritized gender seclusion more than the workers at Delight, who were already working in a mixed-gender environment. Workers in Meena Bazaar did not take their lunch or iftari breaks outside, only ventured down to run errands or buy food which they then brought up to the bazaar, and, unlike the workers in Delight, did not go out in mixed-gender groups. However, on special occasions such as birthdays, they did visit restaurants and malls. Occasionally, they went for a picnic to the beach organized by their employer. Workers in Meena Bazaar and other beauty salons also arranged celebrations at their workplaces to accommodate women who did not have permission from their families to go outside the workplace. They played music, ordered take out, and sometimes arrived earlier or stayed later at work to make sure they could have such celebrations. Department stores were not conducive to such workplace celebrations but Meena Bazaar and beauty salons were. Most workers in Meena and Delight usually visited other spaces in the city with their co-workers but rarely with other friends from their neighborhoods or

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schools. Thus, the workplace was not only a rare space of public life for many women but also became the primary launching pad for women to have other experiences of public life in the city, beyond the workplace itself. The Workplace as a Public and Private Space So far, I have primarily focused on the ways that the workplace and commuting to work allowed women to experience some of the joys and opportunities associated with conventional public spaces. In this section, I briefly acknowledge how workers simultaneously associated domesticity with the workplace and how ideas of public and private remained in flux and relationally invoked in different ways. On the one hand, women emphasized the domesticity of their workplaces. In Meena Bazaar, in particular, women emphasized the women-­ only characteristic of the bazaar to liken it to their homes and said they felt relaxed and safe in the bazaar. Several workers in both Delight and Meena Bazaar shared that they were only allowed to work in these spaces because their family members could easily access their workplaces. Fatima’s husband, for example, came to Delight several times during her first day at work to gauge the atmosphere and make sure his wife was “safe.” These visits extended family discipline into the workplace, thereby impinging upon its status as a public space, untethered from the home, where women could be anonymous. Likening the workplace to their home allowed women to combat the stigma associated with women in public spaces by emphasizing their proximity to domesticity and gender seclusion. Management also introduced discourses of “family” to advance their own strategies of labor control and to ensure that women were allowed by their families to work in these jobs, which further likened the workplace to the private space of the “home.” Unlike workers in white-collar jobs who are encouraged to maintain boundaries between their home and work lives, women in both Meena Bazaar and Delight did not segregate their intimate lives from their work lives. Since their homes did not allow them to openly express themselves, they chose to do so at their workplaces. Thus, workplaces were often intimate spaces and an outlet for women’s emotions. Women also engaged in cognitive domestic labor (Daminger 2019) throughout the day by chatting with co-workers about domestic issues, seeking advice, and problem-­ solving. During lunch and tea breaks in Delight, women invariably made phone calls to their husbands, children, or family members. These phone

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calls ranged from being routine checks to extremely time-sensitive and crucial matters, such as child custody. In Meena Bazaar, women often brought their children to work with them and did other household errands at work during slow hours. On the other hand, workers and their families simultaneously framed the workplace as a public space as well. Workers regularly hid where they worked or that they worked at all from family members and prospective in-laws, which suggested that women were aware of their stigmatized status as working in a public space. However, women also creatively used “publicness” to their own advantage. For example, Nusrat refused a transfer to a branch of Delight that was much closer to her home. Even though commuting to work was difficult, time-consuming, and expensive, she preferred to work far from home, as she did not want her neighbors and family to run into her and judge her for working in such a low-status job. A retail workers’ mother shared that she preferred that her daughter work in a low-status “salesgirl” job in a department store rather than a white-­ collar job in a secluded office. “One never knows what transpires behind closed doors. At least, in the store, I know that she is in front of everyone, everyone can see, she’s safer like that.” In both these instances, the “publicness” of the workplace, which is typically a cause for stigma and a threat to women’s reputation, paradoxically became a preference and was invoked to safeguard women’s moral reputation, although in different ways. Thus, workers, management, and family members deployed malleable meanings of public and private to negotiate women’s participation in a stigmatized public sphere. These examples demonstrate how the categories of home, work, and public space were entangled with each other. Future research can investigate how this “in-betweenness” is mobilized differently across distinct types of workplaces.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have situated women’s social lives at work in the context of working-class women’s spatial practices in the city at large. I find that the working-class beauty and retail workers I spent time with used their workplaces to access the city, have fun, experience a social life, and engage in self-making projects—aspects that are typically associated with public spaces in the city. At the same time, these spaces were also marked by labor control, intimacy, and domesticity that impinged on women’s unfettered access to such fun and freedom. Recognizing the multiplicity of space and

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the inadequacy of the public-private binary, I have argued that the workplace can be studied as an in-between space. Although typically considered a private space, it also serves as a public space, especially for those groups that are excluded from conventional public spaces in the city. I foreground the “publicness” of workplaces to make two broad interventions in our understanding of gendered mobility. One, I advocate for a relational approach, which rethinks “publicness” from the vantage point of complex inequalities. The experience of any space is necessarily shaped by specific subject positions and relatedly, by people’s exclusion from, access to, and experiences in other spaces. Such an approach recognizes that for some groups it is the workplace that is a rare and significant, even if truncated and controlled, realm of urban life. For low-wage women workers in South Asia, the workplace is a crucial space of sociality, social reproduction, exchange of knowledge, and self-transformation. Beyond South Asia as well, women often feel stifled in their homes, have little to no access to or time for spaces besides work and home, and inhabit cities with shrinking public spaces. In this context, the “publicness” of workplaces becomes even more significant. Two, I make a case for urban sociologists to consider the workplace as an urban space and for sociologists of work to locate spatial practices and social life within the bounded workplace, in relation to the broader realm of urban life. Although a range of workplaces can be studied as in-between workplaces, interactive service workplaces allow for even wider access to public life through interactions, not just with co-workers and managers but also customers. A global shift from industrial to service economy and an expansion of precarious gig and home-based work is further blurring the divide between “work,” “home,” and “public space.” Yet, our identities as “workers” are more salient than ever. Analyses that center the workplace as an urban space generating new forms of urban life can shed light on aspects of social life that are otherwise overlooked. Admittedly, workplaces are not an adequate or ideal alternative to conventional public spaces. Pakistani women navigate a hostile city, stigma, patriarchal managerial control, the double shift, and harsh working conditions when they venture out for work. Additionally, female labor force participation remains low and not all working-class women work or are allowed to work in the first place. Further, women’s movements in the city for “work” are still somewhat tolerated, whereas movements for “fun” and “loitering” are even more censured. Thus, feminists have tactically deployed the public-private binary to make effective claims to public space

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and persuasively argued how loitering and spending time in public spaces can resist patriarchal-capitalist norms (Khalili 2016; Khawar 2018; Kirmani 2020; Parikh 2019; Phadke 2020). As these efforts illustrate, access to workplaces does not resolve the problem of women’s unequal access to the city. Critics of these feminist movements have accused them of centering middle-class and individualistic issues of pleasure at the expense of the “real” economic plight of working-class women. However, as my analysis shows, working-class women also prioritize enjoying the city, seeking an escape from their homes, and finding ways to have fun in the city and at work, despite excruciating work and domestic demands. In other words, a politics of work unfolds and is imbricated alongside the politics of pleasure and self-making. Further studies of working-class women’s urban spatial practices, especially as mediated through their workplaces, can contribute to contemporary debates on gender and public space in South Asia by foregrounding working-class women as subjects. If working-class women’s experiences both at work and outside of it are centered, a feminist politics of fun and access to the city will necessarily be hewed to a feminist politics of work.

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CHAPTER 11

Caste-ing Space: Mapping the Dynamics of Untouchability in Rural Bihar, India Indulata Prasad

This paper and research would not have been possible without the exceptional support and persistence of Bhuiyan Dalit women and men. I am grateful to the Editors-in-Chief of J-CASTE, Lawrence R. Simon and Sukhadeo Thorat, for their critical feedback, as it has improved the chapter in innumerable ways. I am also grateful to Eric Friesenhahn at ASU’s Library’s Map and Geospatial Hub for scanning the large hand-drawn paper maps. I am most thankful to the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) for the Junior Fellowship that provided financial support for this research. The chapter has also benefitted from the expertise of Jaida Samudra, whose insightful comments further sharpened the chapter. Any errors that remain are my own responsibility.

First published in CASTE: A Global Journal on Social Exclusion Vol 2 No 1 (2021). I. Prasad (*) Women’s and Gender Studies, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Radhakrishnan, G. Vijayakumar (eds.), Sociology of South Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97030-7_11

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Spatial and social segregation is intrinsic to the caste system and the continued practice of untouchability in India. “Untouchability” refers to the Hindu religious and caste-sanctioned ostracization of Dalits (former “untouchables”) within a system of “graded inequality” (Ambedkar [n.d.] 1989: 101, vol. 5; Simon and Thorat 2020). In the caste hierarchy, each level is defined according to relative purity or impurity, with Dalits occupying the bottom position. According to this ancient Hindu logic of caste, Dalits were born into a state of impurity from which they could not escape, such that their touch (or even their shadow) was considered a source of pollution to others in the caste hierarchy. Any conceptualization of untouchability as merely a form of caste-­ based social discrimination fails to capture its debilitating impacts on those who have been most negatively impacted. Dalits have historically been assigned labor-intensive menial tasks that were deemed “impure,” even though such work was critical to the maintenance of Hindu society (Cháirez-Garza 2014; Kumar 2011; Moon 2001; Rao 2015). The complex code of social and spatial avoidances that developed as a result of the logic of untouchability had and continues to have serious consequences for Dalit survival and assertions for basic human rights. A committee formed by the Government of Bombay in 1928 to investigate the social conditions of the untouchable observed: We do not know of any weapon more effective than this social boycott which could have been invented for the suppression of the Depressed Classes [Dalits]. The method of open violence pales away before it, for it has the most far reaching and deadening effects. It is more dangerous because it passes as a lawful method consistent with the theory of freedom of contract. (quoted by Cháirez-Garza 2014: 42)

The chief architect of the Indian constitution, Dr. B.  R. Ambedkar (1891–1956), who was a Dalit, recognized this when he compared untouchability to racial slavery (Ambedkar [n.d.] 1989: 15, vol. 5; 1990, vol. 7). While he viewed both as examples of unfree social orders, he considered untouchability particularly difficult to root out because it is practiced indirectly as part of a system of social obligation. He argued that, unlike slavery, untouchability does not offer the possibility of emancipation (Ambedkar [n.d.] 1989: 17–18, vol. 5). Even though defining some groups as “untouchable” was formally abolished by the Indian constitution in 1950, and a host of legal safeguards

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were introduced to obliterate caste-based discrimination, the centuries-­old practices of untouchability remain a reality for over two hundred million Dalits and segregation on the basis of untouchability continues to shape social relations to this day, especially in rural India (Census of India 2011; HRW 2007; Teltumbde 2010; Cabalion & Thivet 2019).1 Since Ambedkar’s time, many Dalit scholars have sought to address the problem of the perniciousness of untouchability as the basis for social, economic, physical, temporal, and spatial segregation and examined the ways in which such exclusions shape Dalit subjectivities to this day (Guru 2017; Rege 2006; Prasad 2004; Pawar and Moon 2008; Rawat 2013). In 2000, Dalit scholars and activists began promulgating the term “hidden apartheid” to make explicit the similarities between untouchability and racism and draw attention to the normalization of spatial segregation throughout the rural villages of India (Kannabiran 2006; Omvedt 2001a, b).2 Despite empirical evidence, scholarship, and media reports, the Indian government continues to refute allegations of caste-based discrimination. In a scathing critique of India’s civil society, Human Rights Watch reported: Although there is no de jure policy of segregation in India, Dalits are subject to de facto segregation in all spheres, including housing, the enjoyment of public services and education. This widespread segregation has led to a description of the practice of “untouchability” as India’s “hidden apartheid.” (HRW 2007: 45)

Despite being illegal, “untouchability” thus retains conceptual valence as a critical tool for understanding how Dalit mobilizations and gaining control over productive assets such as land have disrupted and 1  The 1950 Constitution of India mandated Equality before Law (Article 14); prohibited discrimination on the basis of religion, race, caste, sex, or place of birth (Article 15); ensured equality in public employment (Article 16); abolished untouchability and made its practice a punishable offense (Article 17); ensured protection of life and personal liberty (Article 21); prohibited forced labor (Article 23); and mandated living wages for all citizens of India (Article 43). Later laws intended to protect and ensure equal rights for Dalits include: the Untouchability Offences Act of 1955, renamed Protection of Civil Liberties Act, 1955 in 1976; and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, amended in 2015 and 2018 (also see Simon and Thorat 2020: iii; HRW 1999; Rao 2015: 163–181). 2  Such framings have the “creative potential of rearticulating, enlivening and rearranging the very social categories that peripheralize a group’s existence,” thus paving the way for transnational alliances among disenfranchised groups (Tsing 1994: 279).

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reconfigured discriminatory practices in rural Bihar. Even modest gains by Dalits are of great importance given the historical, socio-economic, and political contexts of inequality and discrimination in which they are registered (Prasad 2021). Dalit access to land and other economic resources can be read as overt signs that caste-based discrimination is being undermined, at least in terms of spatial segregation by untouchability. A closer scrutiny of Dalit experiences of improving material circumstances may indicate that the social exclusion in rural areas has only been rendered more “hidden” over time, however. This chapter positions Ambedkar’s early twentieth-century writing on untouchables alongside Dalit philosopher Gopal Guru’s (2017) theorization of the relationships between experience, space, and social justice to examine how the transformations in spaces occupied by Dalits have impacted their experience of untouchability. I draw inspiration from black and feminist geographers who emphasize that the social and spatial domains of experience co-construct and co-produce each other (Massey 1994; McKittrick 2006; Wright 2016). Just as “Black matters are spatial matters” (McKittrick 2006: xii), so are Dalit matters. McKittrick’s (2006: xii) observation that “concealment, marginalization, boundaries are important social processes. We make concealment happen; it is not natural but rather names and organizes where racial-sexual differentiation occurs” raises particularly pertinent questions concerning the interaction between untouchability as a social construct and the production of Dalit spaces and their ascribed meanings. The investigation of Dalit space helps uncover the power of geographic domination attained via the practice of untouchability as well as the pace of change in the experience of untouchability in rural Bihar. Ambedkar addressed the spatiality of untouchability when he argued that “the Touchables living inside the village and Untouchables [living] outside the village in separate quarters” was a kind of ghettoization (Ambedkar [n.d.], 1989: 21, vol. 5). He explained that in order for non-­ Dalits to live near Dalits in rural villages, “the Touchables [non-Dalits] have a code which the Untouchables are required to follow. This code lays down the acts of omissions and commissions which Touchables treat as offences” (21). In short, the perverse hegemonic logic of caste Hinduism generates a normative behavioral code that keeps the vast Dalit population under control. The behavioral code not only puts up obstacles to political and social enfranchisement, it limits Dalit movements to particular spaces that Ambedkar described as the “Indian ghetto—The center of

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untouchability” (19). In rural Bihar, such Dalit-specific neighborhoods are known as the dih. Such segregated spaces need not remain static, however. Although “old spaces normally put up a stubborn resistance to… new concepts,” Guru theorizes that “experience introduces dynamism” into such spaces, which allows for old hierarchies to be reworked and “a new vocabulary of emancipation” to develop (Guru 2017: 78–79). Guru further reminds us that, “along with the expansion of social space, there is also the expansion of conceptual space, entailing the transformation of a particular person into a universal idea” (2017: 103). Guru thus suggests that segregated spaces can be transformed by new experiences. Emblematic of Dalit and non-Dalit perspectives in India, both Ambedkar and Gandhi took the village as a primary unit of analysis (Guru 2017). Gandhi considered the village to represent India’s true democracy, leading Ambedkar to comment sarcastically, “The average Hindu is always in ecstasy whenever he speaks of the Indian village. He regards it as an ideal form of social organization to which he believes there is no parallel anywhere in the world” (Ambedkar [n.d.], 1989: 19, vol. 5). Ambedkar understood that the “Indian village is not a single social unit” because “it consists of castes” ([n.d.], 1989: 20, vol. 5) broadly divided into Dalits (untouchables) and non-­Dalits (touchables). If, as Ambedkar declared, “the Hindu village is a working plant of the Hindu Social order” ([n.d.], 1989: 19, vol. 5), then it is suitable for analyzing the mutating practices of untouchability in rural India. Untouchability does not exist in a vacuum nor does it remain static or uncontested. Its successful reinscription into various social, economic, and political milieu in the face of sustained Dalit assertions of agency requires careful examination. This chapter therefore analyzes some of the ways in which spatial and material aspects of untouchability have been altered (although not done away with completely) at the village level in the decades following Dalit activist movements to own land and secure other rights and resources guaranteed to them in rural Bihar.

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Research Context and Methodology: Mapping Village Spaces in Bodh Gaya, Bihar As a feminist anthropologist interested in social and agrarian change, I concentrated research at the village level, conducting ethnographic fieldwork in villages in Bihar where Bhuiyan Dalits had secured rights to own land following the decade-long radical feminist Bodhgaya Land Movement (BGLM) (Prasad 2021; Prabhat 1999; Kelkar and Gala 1990). In the late 1970s, land movement activists mounted a successful opposition to the Hindu monastic institution popularly known as Bodhgaya Math (BGM), which despite its religious outlook was the most powerful feudal landowner (zamindar) in Gaya. The BGM had controlled vast estates and people throughout the region for centuries and Bhuiyan Dalit kamias (bonded laborers) were forced to serve BGM officials and other landed elites well into the late 1980s. Their experiences of activism gained through joining first the armed Naxalite movement and later the BGLM enabled Bhuiyan Dalits to obtain titles to and actual control over land formerly held by the BGM (Prasad 2021). There has been little documentation of how the redistribution of land to Dalits, particularly Dalit women, affected gender and caste social orders in rural Bihar following the conclusion of the BGLM.  Many academics and journalists have considered state-sponsored land reform to have failed because, instead of putting formerly landless agricultural workers on an even footing with traditional landowners and protecting women’s rights to own land, it paved the way for ongoing, often violent, class-caste war and conflict (Jannuzi 1974; Das 1983; Chaitanya 1993; Louis 2003; Bhatia 2005; Kantha 2010). Scholarly analyses are often problematic because they usually group marginal farmers with caste status together with landless agricultural laborers (i.e., untouchable kamias) into the single category of “peasants” and pitch them against the landed savarna elites (primarily Bhumihars and Rajputs in Bihar). This may contradict Dalit conceptualizations of caste relations. For example, Bhuiyan Dalits in Gaya distinguish themselves from other marginal farmers using local caste terminology. They recount their struggles against grihasts and kisans, including the Shudra castes, Other-Backward Castes (OBC), dominant castes, and Bahujans, who have continually striven to take over the land that was distributed to Bhuiyan Dalits due to the BGLM. To understand how securing control over productive assets such as land has transformed social relations and material conditions of Dalits in Bihar,

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I began conducting fieldwork in the summer of 2009 in the Gaya district and returned to two villages for extended periods from April 2012 through May 2014. Located approximately 18 miles from the town of Bodh Gaya, Kaari (a pseudonym) is one of the relatively small villages in which I conducted research. Kaari residents are categorized within non-Dalit castes (i.e., Yadav, Kahar) and Dalit castes (i.e., Bhuiyan, Dushad, and Pasi). The total population of Kaari today is around 1500 people, the majority of whom are Bhuiyan Dalits. The dominant caste—the Yadav—ranks second in terms of numeric strength in the village. Like most villages in the Bodh Gaya area, Kaari had been under the control of BGM for centuries. When the state government first attempted to implement land reform in the area in the 1960s, the BGM handed control of its feudal land over to the Yadavs. Bhuiyan Dalits joined the BGLM in the early 1980s to agitate for their rights to the land. Their activism resulted in approximately 100 acres of land being redistributed to residents of Kaari, mostly amongst Bhuiyan Dalit women and men.3 By the time I began conducting research in the area, the women who had been at the forefront of grassroots mobilization were in their 70s or 80s. They held a long historic memory of mistreatment by non-Dalits and decades of experience mobilizing to obtain and protect their rights to land and other economic resources. Although I am not a Dalit, we bonded over having struggled to maintain control over land. I lived with a Bhuiyan Dalit family whenever I was in Kaari and many of the women with whom I interacted became invested in participating in my research project as a way of telling their history of Bhuiyan Dalits and Dalit activism to the world at large. Along with recording open-ended interviews and informal story-telling sessions, I asked these women to participate in a spatial mapping process (Praxis 2009; Herlihy and Knapp 2003). I was inspired by other scholar-­ activists who have conducted indigenous land-mapping projects or used the participatory mapping method to undertake social audits in the Global South (Chapin et al. 2005; Sletto 2009). I had earlier taken part in a social audit mapping project in a village in Bihar’s Saharsa district conducted by Praxis: Institute of Participatory Participation. In that case, the village maps were drawn by professionals based on input from the community and did not take into account power differentials along caste- or 3  Non-Dalit women and men whose economic situations were similar to those of Dalits in Kaari were also part of the movement and they also secured rights to redistributed land.

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gender-­ mediated lines. I adapted the village mapping process to my research in Kaari in order to render visible the ways in which the ancient Hindu edict of untouchability have either been undermined or become more covert following Dalit women’s successful participation in the BGLM. I began by asking Bhuiyan Dalit women to draw their immediate social spaces (i.e., houses, locations of key resources in the neighborhood, farmland) on the ground using twigs or colored chalk or on large sheets of paper using crayons, pencils, or colored pens. Apart from the initial demonstrations, the mapping project was thereafter led by Bhuiyan Dalit women with little input or direction from me. From four to six women collaborated on drawing maps on the ground during seven sessions held between May and December of 2012. I photographed and audio-recorded the map-making sessions, each of which lasted roughly two hours. While some women drew maps independently, others worked in groups of two to four women to depict their immediate social spaces. Although Bhuiyan Dalit women preferred drawing maps to any other ethnographic method such as interviews or surveys, the number of mapping sessions that could be effectively conducted was limited by constraints on their time, economic hardship, and health issues exacerbated by poor monsoon seasons. Sometimes the older members of the group designated one or two younger women to draw the maps, expecting that they would incorporate their feedback and observations. Bhuiyan men usually gathered around to observe the women and often drew maps of their own off to the side; the women would then gather around to comment on their maps. Men mapmakers tended to focus primarily on the key routes leading in and out of the village and the village boundaries; their maps were also much smaller in scale compared to the maps drawn by women. Some village grihasts also gathered to observe and ridicule the Dalit women as they drew maps. The women either ignored or rebuked them, saying sarcastically, “If we can make barren land fertile, we can also learn how to do this” or “Looks like you were you born with a pen in your hand?” They thus emphasized that learning takes time and effort, and that illiteracy was a sociological condition, not preordained for Dalits as the grihast onlookers had implied. Despite multiple challenges, including the difficulty of finding a suitable time and space for the project, the map-­ making exercises provided rich information about transformations in the social, material, and spatial dimensions of untouchability in Kaari. The maps drawn by elderly Bhuiyan Dalit women showed their present-day spatiality, that is, the spaces they came to occupy after the BGLM. Drawing

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these “after” maps inspired them to narrate past experiences (referred to below as “before narratives”) of untouchability under the BGM and their activism during the BGLM. They linked their socio-spatial segregation to the material and social practices of non-Dalit caste Hindus and identified the BGLM as a catalyst for social transformation that had enabled them to challenge the ancient codes of association that separated Dalits from nonDalits. Their maps and stories thus rendered visible approximately five decades of change in the practices of untouchability in rural Bihar.

The Spatiality of Untouchability Before and After the BGLM Four key sites of untouchability and resistance to segregation emerged from their maps: (1) housing, (2) sources of potable water, (3) modern infrastructure (roads and electricity), and (4) a community center. In this section, I describe where each of these features was presented on Bhuiyan Dalit women’s maps and in their accompanying narratives and analyze the implications for how untouchability practices have changed over time. Figure 11.1 shows an incomplete map of Kaari hand-drawn by Bhuiyan Dalit women in one of the latter mapping sessions. I have added symbols showing the location of resources that were not depicted in this particular map but were marked in other maps drawn on the ground. This is to assist the reader in following analysis of these features below. Untouchability as Social and Spatial Housing Segregation in Kaari In depicting their physical spaces before the 1960s, when the BGM still controlled the village, Bhuiyan Dalit women always began by outlining their part of the village (the dih), then depicted its relationship to the location of Kaari’s old kachcheri (court). Before the land movement undid the power of the BGM, which was headquartered in Bodh Gaya town, its vast estates were managed from a network of kachcheris established in and around the Gaya district. As the village-level administrative and judicial units of the BGM, the kachcheris housed local BGM officials and the most important village resources such as stored grain and drinking water could only be accessed from within their grounds. Bhuiyan Dalit women usually marked the main well (badka kuan) and temple (Devi staan) on their maps

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Fig. 11.1  Map of Kaari drawn by Bhuiyan Dalit women showing spatial arrangements of housing, including the dih in the southwest (lower right), and location of resources east of the center of the village (vertical black line at left represents the naala [rivulet]) (December 2012). (Photo by author)

of Kaari and explained that both these facilities were located in close proximity to the kachcheri building (Fig. 11.1). Even though the old kachcheri was torn down and new houses built on its foundations after the BGLM, for Bhuiyan women it continues to function as the center of a historical compass from which all other structures radiate in the cardinal directions. They described the location of living spaces beyond the kachcheri in terms of caste. Non-Dalit houses were always built west of the kachcheri, with the Yadav caste residing in closest proximity to it. The village badka kuan was located just west of the kachcheri building within its courtyard, while Dalit huts were located further west of the courtyard. The homes of Dushad Dalits, who served the kachcheri as BGM’s goraiths (armed guard), were lined south of the western edge and marked the boundary of the dih. Dushad Dalits were

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responsible for the security of the village and controlling the bonded agricultural laborers, the Bhuiyan Dalit kamias. Bhuiyan Dalit dwellings were then located in semi-concentric lines northwest of the Dushad Dalits. Some of the women told me they were forced to live west (pachhim) of the center of the village so they would not pollute the badjans (grihasts, non-­Dalits), which they would have done if they had had first access to fresh air (or any other resources). Since the purva winds always blow east to west, if Dalits lived on the east side of the village, they would have rendered the air impure to those living west of them. The village code of untouchability prescribed that Dalits must not only reside further away from non-Dalits to the west, they also had to be located south of the kachcheri, since the south was considered the most inauspicious of the four cardinal directions. One elderly woman explained that “harijans [untouchables, Dalits] were placed on the external boundaries of the village as it was believed we could cast off the evil eye or be the first to bear the brunt of any untoward incidents.” In a sense, Bhuiyan Dalits were located at the outskirts so they could filter out bad luck before it entered the village proper. Until 1955, such ancient “terms of associated life” (Ambedkar [n.d.], 1989: 21, vol. 5) not only spatially segregated Dalits from non-Dalits within the same villages, it also made it an offense for Dalits to possess land, cattle, or wealth in any form, including owning well-constructed houses built from brick and tile. Bhuiyan women described their pre-­ BGLM dwellings as cold, damp mud mounds, no better than “sugaar kae bakbhor [pig sties].” One woman explained that they were also prohibited from wearing shoes or clean clothes: We barely had enough to cover ourselves. Our children would roam naked until they attained puberty [seyan]. Just like the summers, the winters in Gaya are harsh. So, we would all crowd next to the small fire to keep ourselves warm. We were not only covered in ash, but also smelled like ash too.

Such restrictions forced Dalits to somatically inhabit the logic of untouchability, which reinforced the imperative of physical and spatial segregation. The spatial arrangement of the village under the BGM not only compartmentalized people into neighborhoods according to the Hindu religion’s caste logic of purity and pollution, it prevented Dalits from socializing with non-Dalits by restricting their movements through village

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spaces. Bhuiyan women explained that the location of their mud dwellings vis-à-vis the kachcheri ensured that they never had to cross into the nonDalit part of the village. Even when undertaking work demanded of them by local kachcheri officials, they always bypassed the non-Dalit section. They either walked from the dih in the far southwest corner of the village northeast to the kachcheri or west to work in BGM’s agricultural fields, orchards, and cow sheds and maintain the rivulet (naala or pyne) that connected the indigenous irrigation system (ahar) to a nearby river (Fig. 11.1). In 2013, upon noticing my entry as a non-Dalit into the Bhuiyan Dalit space, one of the map-­making participants commented that the reverse situation, Dalits freely walking through non-Dalit spaces, would have been impossible before the BGLM: “You could not just wander into the spaces of the landed castes.” Indeed, I observed non-Dalits (particularly men and elderly women) traversing Dalit parts of the village while I was conducting fieldwork in Kaari, but the reverse almost never occurred. I noticed that whenever Dalits walked into non-Dalit areas to perform specific tasks for grihast households or collect wages, or request a loan from them, it appeared customary for non-Dalits to inquire about the presence of “other castes” or “outsiders” in their space, yet Dalits never questioned the movement of non-Dalits through the dih. However porous spatial segregation becomes, it still renders the social segregation of untouchability. The kachcheri as center of control ceased to exist when the BGM ceded its fertile agricultural lands, irrigation systems, and village courts to grihasts, ostensibly to comply with the state-mandated redistributive land reform policies of the 1960s, but mainly to win their support. Power over rural villages also diffused to the grihasts as they took over kachcheri premises. In Kaari, the location of non-Dalit spaces with respect to the old kachcheri became obscured as influential grihasts began building their homes there. Women used black lines to mark grihast homes along the edges of the old kachcheri foundations (in pencil) just northeast of the dih (Fig. 11.1). A Dalit woman told me that “the only way you can tell that there was a BGM kachcheri in Kaari today is by looking at the foundation of the building on which the grihasts have constructed their homes. They build their house on the foundation of the kachcheri because it was very strong.” Non-Dalits then built more houses adjacent to the old kachcheri as far west as the walls of the courtyard, but never crossing into Dalit space. Thus, they continued to maintain the caste mandate of spatial segregation.

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The physical distance between Dalit and non-Dalit homes has nevertheless been reduced over the past five decades by a few Dalits who constructed houses northeast of the old dih (Fig. 11.1, middle to upper left). One of the women mapmakers told me that before the BGLM: It was overcrowded in the dih as our families were expanding, but we could not move out. We were not allowed to. Anytime there was a disease, it would take a toll on the community. [But] after we secured the land, some of us moved out.

Thus, one of the results of the BGLM was a closing of the west-east gap between residential neighborhoods in Kaari. A couple of new Dalit and non-Dalit dwellings constructed since the 1990s even share boundary walls. However, I observed that the shared walls are nearly twice as high as other boundary walls that do not connect Dalit with non-Dalit spaces. The taller walls present a visual and physical barrier to interaction between neighbors and prevent Dalits from crossing the line of segregation.4 Even as the borderlines seem to have become blurred and the caste logic of complete segregation between Dalits and non-Dalits has been undermined, the village core retains the old spatial manifestations of untouchability. Despite the visually obvious reduction in spatial segregation, untouchability has continued to be covertly reinscribed in the structure and quality of new Dalit homes in Kaari. Even though Bhuiyan Dalits challenged the old “terms of associated life” by using government grants to construct “homes made of bricks” and plastered roofs, their houses were built very poorly compared to non-Dalit houses. Most of them are a simple one-­ story structure with four brick walls, often without windows or a sturdy ceiling. Where brick ceilings were constructed, many of them caved in under their own weight. One map-making participant complained, Look at the way they construct our houses. Do you think they would build the houses of grihasts who are in a similar economic situation like ours or their own homes like this? No. For Dalits, they think that four walls and a 4  In Ghanshyam Shah, Harsh Mander, Sukadeo Thorat, Satish Despande, and Amita Bavikar’s (2006) Untouchability in Rural India, it was noted that of the 565 villages in 11 major states of India surveyed, Dalits were denied entry into homes of higher castes, in more than 70 percent of the villages and in 63 percent of the villages, Dalits were denied access to public places of worship.

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ceiling are enough, but for grihasts, they make sure it looks like a proper house.

I found evidence supporting these charges when I interviewed a non-Dalit widow who had taken part in the BGLM alongside the Bhuiyan Dalits and like them been granted title to an acre of redistributed land. Her house had been built with funds from the same government housing assistance scheme that the Dalits had tapped, but unlike theirs, hers had two rooms with storage shelves built into the walls, windows with sills, a small hallway at the entrance, and outside stairs leading to the roof. She told me she planned to add more stories to her house later on. The contractors put in charge of building houses under the government scheme were almost always non-Dalits. They would drop off construction materials in the dih, but were rarely seen again thereafter. They almost never showed up to explain how to design a house, supervise the construction work, or check that the building was sound. Bhuiyan women explained that non-Dalit laborers viewed working for Dalits as an insulty (insult) that undermined their social status in the village hierarchy. Non-­ Dalit laborers also refused to eat food that had been prepared for them in a Dalit house. Overt practices of untouchability that stigmatized the consumption of food cooked in Dalit houses or working for Dalits made it very difficult for Dalits to hire skilled non-Dalit laborers. Bhuiyan Dalits told me that even when they could afford to hire non-Dalits, the laborers often failed to follow their stipulations. Consequently, Dalits usually relied on unskilled laborers from within their own households or the extended Dalit community to construct their houses; this usually meant only a single room ended up being constructed.5 Although the codes and practices of untouchability became illegal in 1955, the comparisons between the location and quality of Dalit and non-­ Dalit housing before and after the BGLM demonstrate that segregation has been retained but has become more covert. While some Dalits appear to live alongside non-Dalits with their houses abutting each other, the old west-east demarcation has never been crossed. Furthermore, though their houses are no longer mud huts, they are still poor quality compared to houses built for non-Dalits under the same government grants. Similar 5  Houses built by Dalits who had worked in the construction sector in the cities tended to be better designed than those built by Dalits who only had experience making bricks at the kilns.

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changes from overt segregationist practices to more covert forms of untouchability are revealed in women’s marking access to potable water on their maps of Kaari, discussed next. Untouchability and Water Access Discrimination in Kaari Exerting control over access to water has long been used by non-Dalits to institute and maintain the caste hierarchy and boundaries of touchability (Joshi 2011). This form of control is very obvious in the history of where sources of water were placed in Kaari. When the BGM was still in power, the only source of potable water in the village was the badka kuan located just west of the kachcheri building (Fig. 11.1). The code of untouchability dictated that Dalits were not allowed to draw water from the well on their own volition; they were also prohibited from digging a well within the dih. To obtain fresh water, Dalits approached the western edge of the kachcheri courtyard, set their buckets down at some distance from the badka kuan, then backed away and waited until a non-Dalit took pity on them and filled their buckets with water. Distance between the Dalit buckets and grihast pails around the well was always maintained to ensure that no drops bounced from the Dalits’ buckets into the grihasts’ pails. Bhuiyan Dalits rarely failed to adhere to these ancient rules about drawing water from the well; they knew that the entire Bhuiyan community would be punished with extreme violence if they violated the code of untouchability. When the BGM transferred the kachcheri and agricultural land to the grihasts in the 1960s, the power to allocate critical resources such as water also shifted to the grihasts. Bhuiyan Dalits were now allowed to draw water from the badka kuan using their own pails, but only after the non-­ Dalits had drawn water first and then vacated the area. Then, when Dalits began openly mobilizing to demand their land rights in the 1980s, grihasts retaliated by refusing to share the village well water with them at all. Bhuiyan Dalit women told me that the grihasts put a 24-hour guard on the perimeter of the badka kuan and lay thorny branches on and around it to prevent Dalits from obtaining water. They depicted this on their maps by drawing twigs and thorns covering the mouth of the well (Fig. 11.2). Elderly Bhuiyan women told me stories about walking many miles, often on empty stomachs, under the scorching sun to draw water from nearby villages or the river, but recalled that they did so with ranti (revolutionary) songs on their lips.

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Fig. 11.2  Bhuiyan Dalit woman sketching badka kuan (main village well) covered with thorny branches (May 2012). (Photo by author)

The “after” BGLM maps of Kaari and women’s narratives show that sources of potable water proliferated as Dalits mobilized to assert their rights from the 1980s onward. In 1993 or 1994, Bhuiyan Dalits obtained government funds to dig two wells in the dih and one in the newly established neighborhood northeast of the dih that had mixed-caste composition. Ambedkar once argued that untouchables “having a pucca [permanent] well for themselves” held socio-religious implications, since it was read as “an attempt to raise themselves to the status of the Hindus, which is contrary to the established order” ([n.d.], 1989: 38, vol. 5). While the Bhuiyan Dalits of Kaari may not have intended to make any such statement, their construction of a well certainly challenged the terms of associated life and undermined grihast control over resources necessary for survival. Unfortunately, the wells in the dih were much shallower than the badka kuan, so they dried up every summer. By the time I was conducting field research, they were no longer in use.

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Similarly, the government approved five hand pumps (for pumping water up from the aquifer) to be installed in the dih between 2005 and 2014. Only three of them were functional at the time women were drawing maps of the village. Two more hand pumps were then installed in the newly settled mixed-caste area of the village, one near the primary school and another closer to the non-Dalit neighborhood (Fig. 11.3). The location of these two pumps adhered to the rules of caste segregation in rural Bihar. My host Dalit family, who had moved out of the overcrowded dih to the new section, told me to obtain my drinking water from the mixed-­ caste area. They claimed that the hand pumps used by non-Dalits provided sweeter, cooler water than the hand pumps meant only for Dalits. While the proliferation of hand pumps in Kaari has made drinking water more accessible to Dalits, and thus somewhat diminished the power of the untouchability code, it has not completely ended this ancient form of

Fig. 11.3  Map showing location of two hand pumps in the new mixed-caste neighborhood in northern Kaari. Each of the three mapmakers in this session had their own chalk color (May 2012). (Photo by author)

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Fig. 11.4  Non-Dalit women washing clothes at the badka kuan (March 2014). (Photo by author)

segregation. Non-Dalit women continue to occupy the space around the old badka kuan and use its water to wash their clothes or for other cleaning purposes, but Bhuiyan Dalit women never go to the old well (Fig. 11.4). Dalit women told me they prefer to use nearby hand pumps over entering spaces traditionally reserved for non-Dalits even though they consider the water from pumps in Dalit spaces to be inferior to the water from pumps used by non-Dalits. Meanwhile, Dalits who are still living in and drawing water from hand pumps in the dih are often sickened by waterborne illnesses. In the summer of 2013, diarrhea and dysentery, probably caused by fecal contamination of the groundwater, led to the death of at least one child and the hospitalization of several others from the dih. Non-Dalits and Dalits such as my host family who lived outside the dih in less caste-segregated spaces were not as impacted by these illnesses. Although it is not uncommon in rural Bihar for groundwater to become unpotable, the disproportionate

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numbers of Dalits who were sickened because they drank water from pumps located within the dih raises the possibility that public works undertaken in Dalit spaces are substandard. Just as the houses built for Dalits were poorly designed and constructed and even became uninhabitable when their roofs fell in, the non-Dalits who installed pumps in the dih may not have bore the wells as deeply into the aquifer as they did when boring wells in other parts of the village. Thus, water from dih pumps is more easily contaminated. The Bhuiyan Dalits living in the dih did not voice this suspicion to me nor did they start going to the badka kuan or pumps outside the dih to obtain water. Instead, Dalits and non-Dalits alike continued to draw on the Hindu logic of untouchability to explain away Dalit illnesses and deaths. They attributed Dalit deaths to the wrath of local deities, thus signaling the need for immediate propitiation. My host family told me that if Dalits failed to make offerings to these deities, the entire village would suffer. Just as residing in the least propitious corner of the village (southwest of the old kachcheri) prevents misfortune from happening to non-­ Dalits, Dalit deaths perform the caste-related task of protecting caste Hindus. Dalits voluntarily excluding themselves from spaces containing water resources, while claiming that water from non-Dalit pumps is sweeter and cleaner than water from nearby pumps and explaining away preventable Dalit illnesses and deaths as the result of supernatural forces, demonstrates the perniciousness of covert practices of segregation in Kaari. Self-exclusion ensures that any resources located in purely non-Dalit spaces remain out of bounds to Dalits. Locating hand pumps in Dalit and non-Dalit residential spaces alike represents an ostensible democratization of space and access to basic survival necessities, yet segregation by untouchability continues to be justified and covertly practiced. Although the struggle to obtain resources the state has earmarked for them remains the same irrespective of the type of resource, Dalits have found it somewhat easier to gain access to modern resources (e.g., electricity) that were not covered by the ancient terms of associated life. Reinscribing Untouchability in Modern Infrastructure While women’s narratives of the past provided a window into the spatial arrangements of Kaari according to the terms of associated life under the BGM, maps of the present depicting key markers of modernity such as

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paved roads, electrical poles, solar-powered street lamps, schools, and a community center seem to suggest that the traditional logic of untouchability has been disrupted. A closer scrutiny reveals that the untouchability principle still permeates modern infrastructure. For example, Dalits asked me if I had ever paid attention to where the paved road ended in Kaari. I then noticed that I always walked into the dih on footpaths, since no roads entered the area. Similarly, the high-tension electrical wires that carried electricity into the village from distant plants always swerved past Dalit homes, but were connected to nearby non-Dalit homes. Electricity came to Kaari only in the early twenty-first century, with the first transformer being installed in Kaari in 2006 or 2007 near the village primary school. Non-Dalits were the first to benefit from this resource, which they used to run household utilities and agricultural machinery. They did not pay for the electricity, however; instead, they drew power illegally by running a wire held up on wooden or bamboo sticks to the main lines. The first transformer soon broke down. Dalits recounted subsequent stages of electrification of the village. By 2012, electric poles had been installed along all the main routes within the village; some of the poles in the dih did not have power lines attached to them, however. The few Dalit houses that were attached to a line primarily used the electricity to charge a mobile phone or light a single bulb after dark. Bhuiyan women told me that even though there were vast discrepancies in access and usage of electricity between Dalits and non-Dalits, Dalits were initially expected to contribute as much as non-Dalits to the repair fund (for maintaining the transformer) and pay the same monthly fee for the utility. They later negotiated to have their charges be based on consumption, which resulted in much lower payments. They attributed their success to having had previous experience in grassroots activism during the BGLM. The supply of electricity in rural Bihar is quite erratic, with electricity often unavailable for hours or days at a time. This has led to a demand for solar panels. In 2014, two solar-powered streetlamps in Kaari were installed using local government (sarkari) funds. Both were located in the new mixed-­caste section of the village (Fig. 11.1). One was installed near the house of the most influential Yadav and the other was located near the house of the most influential Bhuiyan Dalit in the village. Dalits credit their own mobilization efforts and the integrity of the recently elected Mukhiya (local governmental representative), a Yadav from a neighboring village, for arranging to have a solar lamp set up in a space accessible to Dalits. Dalits noted that of all the candidates running for electoral office,

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only this Mukhiya followed through with his campaign promise, despite opposition from members of his own caste. Even though candidates running for office often promise to work on behalf of Dalits, breaking with one’s caste after being elected, particularly to side with Bhuiyan Dalits, is rare. The disbursement of infrastructural resources that have been marked for Dalits by successive state governments has almost always been controlled by non-Dalits. They have often appropriated or hoarded these resources for their own caste groups. Governance in rural Bihar mimics this model wherein future votes are secured through the careful disbursement of sarkari funds, which sustains the inequality endemic to the caste system. The solar lamppost near a Dalit home thus represented an exception to the rule, as non-Dalits usually succeed in appropriating resources meant for Dalits. As a Bhuiyan woman in the map-making group noted, “Money or resources are allocated to us by the sarkar, but we never get to see it. The grihasts take it.” The Bhuiyan Dalit community is proud of having secured a solar-­ powered lamp in their living space. Dalit neighborhoods are usually characterized by complete darkness at night, but now at least one place is illuminated. Despite the hordes of insects it attracts, the space around the lamppost has become a social gathering spot for Dalit women and their children, who often complete their schoolwork or play under its light. Notably, children from nearby non-Dalit households never join them, nor do non-Dalit adults. Sharing resources in Dalit spaces—which would transgress ancient implicit habits of spatial segregation—remains inconceivable for the majority of non-Dalits in Kaari. Community Facilities as Failed Challenges to Untouchability In 2007, the Bihar government led by Nitish Kumar launched 19 social and economic programs intended to benefit groups identified as Mahadalits, which now include 21 of the most socio-economically marginalized Dalits such as the Bhuiyan (Government of Bihar 2020). One of the programs provided funds for constructing a “community hall cum work-shade,” or samudaya bhavan as it was referred to locally, to make a place for Bhuiyan Dalits to hold social and cultural events. As the village panchayat (council) in Kaari refused to make land available, a widowed Bhuiyan Dalit woman donated her own plot in the dih to the project. This meant that Bhuiyan Dalit homes would adjoin the samudaya bhavan (Fig. 11.1). The government stipulated that the building would have one

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large meeting room, a smaller room, verandah, and a bathroom with an adjoining water pump. A non-Dalit contractor from Kaari began construction late in 2012, but by 2013, he had only laid the concrete foundation and erected brick walls. The building still needed a roof, window frames and glass, doors, external and internal plastering, and paint; it remained unclear when the contractor would resume work. The women who participated in map-making sessions in 2012 admitted that the structure was unlikely ever to be completed properly, but still viewed having one constructed in the dih as a significant win for Bhuiyan Dalits. They asserted that the new structure filled a void in the village by providing a space dedicated to Bhuiyan Dalit social events and gatherings. Furthermore, locating Kaari’s samudaya bhavan within the dih violated the ancient code of untouchability, since it was a form of property that had not been made available to grihasts. Mapmakers repeatedly commented that if the community center had been built on the eastern, non-Dalit side of the village, it would have been impossible for Dalits to access it. In July 2020, I telephoned my Dalit consultants to confirm some information and noticed that they now referred to the building as the “Bhuiyans’ samudaya bhavan.” The caste label had been absent in our exchanges in 2012 through 2014, implying that caste identities were firming up in Kaari. They told me that the only social event that had ever been held at the community center was a song-recording session I had arranged in March 2014. They also told me that the widow who had donated the land in the first place was residing in the building (which has now been completed) with her young daughters and a son. No one expressed surprise or concern that the community center was being used as a residence. They explained that the structure still served Bhuiyan Dalits in that it provided a safe place for children to play and everyone in the dih could draw water from its hand pump. One of my key interlocutors commented drily, however, that “the only thing that all the caste members of this village share is the primary school; the rest has caste labels.” His words and tone of voice seemed to suggest that even the most well-meaning government welfare programs intended to benefit Dalits by desegregating resources always ended up etching the line of untouchability more deeply into the social fabric of village life. The only public building in Kaari wherein Dalits might encounter non-Dalits is the primary school (Figs. 11.1 and 11.3); however, the school does not benefit Dalits much since it is rarely in session. At best, it provides free mid-day meals to their young children.

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Non-­Dalits and relatively financially secure Dalit parents seek an education for their children by other means. In 2014, most of the non-Dalit boys from Kaari were enrolled in private schools located across the river, and Dalit and non-Dalit parents hired a local tutor to instruct their girls (and young boys) in a makeshift thatched structure (private school) located in the new northeast section of the village (Fig. 11.1). Thus, neither having a public school nor a community center built in areas to which Dalits have access has done much to weaken the hold of untouchability in Kaari.

Discussion: The Shifting Nature of Untouchability in Rural Bihar Maps drawn by Bhuiyan Dalit women and their accompanying narratives reveal that Dalit assertions of their rights to resources, in conjunction with state-led land reform and welfare initiatives, have altered the spatial arrangements of village life and Dalit experiences of socio-economic discrimination. Some salient points that emerged from the mapping process include the ways in which caste segregation is both challenged and reinscribed over time, as Dalits repeatedly attempt to assert their legal rights, only to be met with the threat of violence or have the resources promised them by the government appropriated by non-Dalits. Untouchability Challenged and Reinscribed Each change to Dalits’ material circumstances has been excruciatingly slow and heavily contested. Bhuiyan Dalit narratives of their experiences prior to the 1960s suggest that the BGM’s kachcheri functioned as a sort of Foucauldian Panopticon to control Dalit agricultural laborers (Foucault 1995). The location of the kachcheri in the most propitious (eastern) part of the village reflects its centrality to the lives of village residents. It circumscribed their movements to specific parts of the village and regulated who had access to survival resources such as water. The spatial arrangements of housing and resources around the kachcheri mirrored the graded inequalities of the caste system and reified the concepts of purity and pollution. By this logic, it made sense to house Dushad Dalits (the BGM’s armed guard), to mark the southwestern boundary of the village. Such ghettoization facilitated surveillance and prevented Bhuiyan Dalits from shirking duties or deserting the village altogether.

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The vast network of kachcheris sustained the BGM’s governance of southern Bihar, so its dismantling diffused feudal-monastic power in the region. When the BGM handed land to the grihasts, the power of the kachcheri declined. New houses were built on its foundations and then on land north of the former kachcheri where BGM’s orchards and cowsheds had been located. Some Dalits and non-Dalits who could afford to build houses in the northern area eventually moved there, creating a mixed-­ caste settlement. Other non-Dalits expanded their houses through the center of the village until they reached the walls that separated the east from the west sides of the village. Non-Dalits have never moved south of the village center, however, and the old dih at the southwestern boundary of the village remains a segregated space. Although these spatial changes— moving north and reducing the distance between Dalit and non-Dalit homes—give the impression that the ancient terms of association have been undone, the logic of untouchability (and thus segregation) has been retained. Threat of Collective Violence Undergirds Untouchability The mapping process demonstrated the fragility of purported amenity between Dalits and non-Dalits, as every productive resource remains a site of contestation between grihasts and Bhuiyan Dalits. The grihasts attempted to thwart Bhuiyan Dalits initial efforts to mobilize against them by preventing the entire community from accessing the badka kuan, which was the only source of potable water at the time. This demonstrates that punishment for violating the code of untouchability is always collective, even when the offending action is committed by a single individual. Non-­ Dalits targeting the entire Dalit community for the perceived faults of an individual Dalit reinforce caste-mediated social and spatial boundaries. Although such violence has become a little less frequent, Bhuiyan Dalits continue to be targeted as a community. For example, in February 2013, a Dalit youth was asked by a non-Dalit youth not to dance too close to a vehicle carrying the goddess Saraswati to a nearby river for ritual immersion. The ensuing argument led to physical violence against the Bhuiyan Dalits of Kaari, who were forced to retaliate as a group. After this incident, Bhuiyan Dalits told me that they avoided entering non-Dalit areas even more than usual and only dealt with non-­Dalits very cautiously to avoid an escalation in violence. Similarly, the hand pump the government installed close to a Yadav house became a contested site in the new northern section

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of Kaari (Fig.  11.1). During times of conflict, grihasts have threatened Bhuiyan Dalits with violence to prevent them from drawing water from this pump. The Dalits then have to travel further from their homes to get water from a hand pump located near the sarkari (public) school (Figs. 11.1 and 11.3). When confronted with violence, Dalits seldom complain to the police or take perpetrators to court; they prefer to settle matters with their non-­ Dalit neighbors directly. They acknowledge that despite laws that have been established to protect them, the administration rarely favors Dalits. As one of my key interlocutors noted, “Everything revolves around money here. We don’t have the resources to hold the grihasts accountable through the administration,” because it mostly works in the interests of non-Dalits. Appropriation by Non-Dalits of Critical Resources Allocated to Dalits Perpetuates Untouchability The mapping process and Dalit narratives provide evidence of the persistent efforts by grihasts to usurp state resources intended for Mahadalits (Mosse 2018). Grihasts deliberately fabricate documents to suggest that their socio-economic status is much lower than it actually is so they can obtain government funds. One of the Bhuiyan women commented ironically, “Ab badjan Harijan ban gayel aur Harijan badjan [Now the grihasts pose as Dalits and present Dalits as grihasts]” to the government. Non-Dalits also arrange to have Bhuiyan Dalits in need of assistance stricken from government beneficiaries lists. An elderly Bhuiyan woman solicited laughter from other women when she pointed to her shriveled hands and commented: Each time I’ve asked the officials to list my name for the old-age pension, they say I am not eligible. I tell them, “Look at me, my hair and my hands; if this does not look like old-age, then what does?”

The fact that some resources such as brick houses, water, and electricity have become available in Dalit spaces suggests that the most dehumanizing aspects of the old code of untouchability (i.e., when it was a punishable offense for Dalits to own land, build houses with tile roofs, wear clean clothes, or draw water from the communal well) have been undone. The qualitative experiences of Dalits are more complex, however. Although their living conditions have certainly improved over the past half century,

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the infrastructure in Dalit spaces remains inferior to that enjoyed by non-­ Dalits: their homes do not have windows and their roofs cave in soon after construction; water from their pumps is often contaminated; and their community center is never completed by the government contractor. These facts are evidence of a practice of untouchability wherein Dalits are still prevented from fully enjoying the resources and rights for which they have so long struggled. With non-Dalits in charge of welfare programs, every attempt to improve the quality of Dalit lives becomes hijacked by the very officials meant to implement them. Although the socio-spatial segregation of Kaari has evolved from being readily discernible in the layout of the village (i.e., segregated housing quadrants, inaccessible well water) to being hidden from view (i.e., by the proliferation of hand pumps, location of a solar lamp, development of a mixed-caste housing area), it continues to inform and shape all interactions between Dalits and non-­ Dalits. Dalits must remain vigilant and constantly prepared to mobilize to improve their physical conditions because each such attempt challenges a deeply ingrained code that forbids Dalits from rising to the same social status as non-Dalit Hindus. Bhuiyan women are well aware of this discrimination. They recognize that Dalit labor is the basis for all economic activities in the village, yet they are not permitted to use their expertise or skills to advance their own situation if doing so gives the appearance of behaving as equals with non-Dalits. As one of the mapmakers put it, “It is our labor that made the houses, the clothes, the grain, and yet we are [still] forced to live among animals, naked and hungry.” Although the outlines of the Dalit ghetto have changed, the underlying principle of untouchability has not—it has only mutated.

Conclusion Refusing to openly acknowledge the ongoing discriminatory practices of untouchability in rural Bihar undermines the ability of Bhuiyan Dalits to fully gain control over productive assets that could ensure sustained socio-­ economic gains and changes in their social status. The evidence suggests that Dalit assertions of their legal rights do not translate into an equitable distribution of material resources or mitigation of social segregation, even when the state attempts to redress their historical socio-economic marginalization by building facilities that should have given them equal access to water, electricity, housing, and schools.

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The maps drawn by Bhuiyan women depict the results of many decades of Dalit agency. At the same time, they provide insight into the interplay of social, economic, and political powers of non-Dalits vested in segregating themselves from Dalits and appropriating and regulating all resources that might allow Dalits to make a qualitative and quantitative shift in their circumstances. As Guru predicts, however, Dalits’ activist experiences in the land movement (coupled with state programs intended to democratize resources) has introduced dynamism into segregated spaces. This dynamism has mitigated but not entirely undone the structural (and physical) violence that still undergirds the spatial and social milieu of rural India. Dalits and non-Dalits continue to operate in a caste hierarchy that keeps everyone in their place, physically and socially. Although Dalit villagers have successfully asserted their rights to access basic resources and thereby altered the more blatant enforcements of the untouchability code and blurred the edges of spatial segregation, every gain they make remains precarious and their autonomy threatened in rural Bihar.

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CHAPTER 12

Following the Prophet’s Sunnah: Class, Piety, and Power in a Pakistani Bazaar Umair Javed

In recent decades, the growth of fundamentalist and revivalist movements has made Islamist actors the subject of numerous scholarly works centered in Muslim majority countries. Yet, due to the exigencies of the so-called war on terror and accompanying anxieties associated with various theaters of conflict, the vast majority of this scholarship retains an uncritical focus on geo-politics and its interplay with transnational violence and militancy, while paying little attention to sociological bases of religious-cultural transformation. The case of such scholarship in Pakistan is no different. There is a considerable and continuously growing body of work on the State and its relationship with Islamic militancy, the varying strategies of Islamist actors,

The author would like to thank the editors and reviewers of the volume for their extremely helpful feedback and guidance.

U. Javed (*) Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Lahore, Pakistan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Radhakrishnan, G. Vijayakumar (eds.), Sociology of South Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97030-7_12

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and the role of militancy in shaping regional geo-politics (Fair 2011; Jamal 2014; Shah 2014). Ontologically, much of this literature treats religion either as an abstract cultural essence or as a highly instrumentalized Statecentric phenomenon. The former tends to see Islam as an ahistorical cultural artifact within Pakistani public life, wherein a country of static believers plays out ideological preferences and religious dispositions on a day-to-day basis (Richter 1979). The latter, on the other hand, focuses solely on the instrumental imposition of Islamic ideology by self-serving State elites in society at large (Ziring 1984; Daechsel 1997). While the former de-socializes religion completely, the latter locates its entire basis in the instrumental politics of the State, itself. In either case, the role of lived social experiences and material practices in developing, normalizing, and contesting particular ideational forms remains missing. This empirical and theoretical oversight persists despite the fact that contemporary Islamic revivalism in Pakistan also includes expansive urban social phenomena such as piety movements, political parties, shariah-­ compliant businesses, televangelists, religious schools, Islamic charities, and NGOs. Barring a few notable exceptions, these movements and what they can tell us about how cultural transformations are tied to social realities of power, such as class and inequality, remain woefully understudied. We are thus left with little idea of what constitutes the social bases and manifestations of religious revivalism, as well as what role religious revivalism and assertion play in the functioning and interplay of social relations. Muslim majority countries, such as Pakistan, provide an important context in which to interrogate such questions, given the globally pervasive scale and assertion of religio-cultural processes and the unceasing march of structural social transformations induced by (and reflected through) the phenomenon of rapid urbanization, increased marketization and commercialization of public life, and new forms of inequality underscored by social and economic informalization. This chapter thus intervenes in this gap and attempts to situate contemporary Islamic assertion sociologically, through a case study of religious public life and its role in the everyday functioning of large bazaars or large “informal” marketplaces. Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Shah Alam bazaar, located in the country’s second largest city of Lahore (pop: 11.1 million), this chapter argues that contemporary Islamic assertion is, in part, socially grounded in the functioning of hegemonic class aspirations of dominant commercial actors, such as traders and merchants, and their relations with the urban poor. This interplay operates through a contemporary

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“bazaar-­mosque” relationship, involving the dominant mercantilist class, as well as religious actors (prayer leaders, Islamic social movements, evangelist, and preachers) who mutually constitute and assert shared conceptions of Muslim identity, public piety, and virtue, while simultaneously reifying class-based distinctions and inequality as “divinely” ordained. More specifically, by focusing on everyday conversations, shared ritual experiences, and material practices, I lay out how dominant merchants and traders help develop, amplify, and normalize religious interpretations that consecrate favorable class and status hierarchies. The inequality-reifying outcomes of these processes are enabled, structurally, by entrenched power imbalances arising out of the neoliberal economic and political foundations of Pakistan’s cities, their commercial spaces, in particular, and institutionally by financial networks that enable bazaar traders to play a central role in administering local mosques, madrassahs (religious schools), and religious charities. Ultimately, these roles help recast the status of the local propertied class of traders and merchants as not just economic but also social and political patrons. In the sections that follow, I first provide the context to this study by reviewing the literature on material and cultural processes in bazaars in Pakistan and other Muslim majority countries, highlighting the oft-missed sociological foundations of religious revivalism in Pakistan. I then provide details about the fieldwork conducted in Lahore. The empirical sections lay out how particularist Islamic interpretations emerge through the functioning of the bazaar-mosque relationship and the everyday lives of commercial propertied classes. I simultaneously illustrate how these religious imaginaries and ideals condition the universe for subordinate groups in the same space. Finally, I conclude by tracing these processes of ideational contestation and hegemony to the sociological basis of power and inequality in the marketplace.

The Bazaar and Islam in Urban Pakistan and Beyond In line with changes witnessed in other Muslim countries, the post-1980s phase in Pakistan can be described in terms of Bayat’s concept of “post-­ Islamism” (2007), which has seen a re-orientation of the religious field away from the institutional capture of the State and toward a refashioning of society itself. This, what Iqtidar (2011, 547) calls the Gramscian turn in Islamism, emerges from a “socialized” view of power within Islamic circles, which now sees the State as reflective of and enmeshed within social

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relations rather than existing as an independent and autonomous actor. The application of this view, and a significant part of the political and cultural enmeshment, takes place through societal economic and cultural institutions such as bazaars and attendant religious organizations. In the sections that follow, I briefly review the literature on bazaars and their social and cultural role in Pakistan and comparator Muslim countries. For centuries, large marketplaces have played an important role in the public and political life of towns and cities in South Asia and beyond. However, in recent years, the proliferation of commerce on the back of new patterns and scales of neoliberalization-induced consumerism has granted the business of retail-wholesale trade even greater prominence, with the case of Pakistan’s bazaar sector being particularly instructive in this regard. Retail and wholesale trade now commands substantial space in Pakistan’s economy. It currently contributes 18.4 percent of total GDP, and it employs approximately 18 percent of the total labor force and 41 percent of the working population in towns and cities (Pakistan Bureau of Statistics 2014). While overall economic growth has averaged a paltry 3.5 percent per annum since 2007, the bazaar sector has grown by nearly 6 percent per annum in real terms during the same time period. Its estimated value is now approximately US $42 billion, with annual sales (consumption) reaching US $155 billion through 1.6 million establishments (Ministry of Commerce 2013). A central facet of the bazaar is its role in the growth and consolidation of the informal economy. In terms of employment, 65 percent of the total urban labor force is informally contracted. That means approximately 11.6 million individuals are working beyond the ambit of social protection and minimum wage laws and without any recourse to social security and employment benefits (Pakistan Bureau of Statistics 2014). A significant portion of this informal economic activity and employment is found in bazaars across the country. An estimated 94 percent of the enterprises in retail-wholesale trade operate without government registration or formal regulation. Similarly, 90 percent of the sector’s workforce—constituted by 4.2 million individuals—is informally employed, mostly through verbal contracts (Pakistan Bureau of Statistics 2014). Recent trends show that while formal distribution channels outside of bazaars (such as shopping malls and hypermarkets) have opened up, these constitute less than 5 percent of total commerce. In fact, formalization and corporatization within trading is still in its infancy, as new businesses

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prefer to maximize autonomy and profit by operating as unregistered entities (Williams and Shahid 2014, 7). Given its economic centrality and scale, the largely informal retail-­ wholesale economy—working through the bazaar—is neither spatially marginal nor economically peripheral to urban life in Pakistan. Its internal processes of capital accumulation and commodity exchange play an important role in shaping the structure of socio-economic stratification in urban centers. Bazaar merchants and traders attain their socially and economically dominant propertied class status through its functioning. It also acts as an important site of the production and reproduction of class inequality between this bazaar elite on the one hand and a large swathe of urban informal workers on the other hand. Equally importantly, a common theme that emerges when Pakistan’s political economy is placed alongside that of other Muslim majority countries is that the bazaar and its attendant social formations exercise significant roles in shaping the ideational and cultural contours of urban public life. In Pakistan, as in many Muslim societies, the mosque and the bazaar also share a geographic affinity, as both are the most frequented public spaces in any neighborhood. Most mosques remain geographically attached to commercial spaces and thus prove to be a congregating point for bazaar businessmen, their customers, and local religious figures. To date, however, there exists only a small body of research on the ubiquitous role of religiosity in the bazaars of Pakistan. A recent anthropological study of merchants in Karachi shows that the evolution and assertion of religious subjectivities takes place among tensions between personal aspiration, Islamic moral values of asceticism and sacrifice (which are widely prevalent in a Muslim population), and the profit-maximizing impulses of capitalism (Baig 2014). Ultimately, the navigation and balancing of these tensions is through public acts such as charitable giving and ritualistic worship, especially from the Sufi tradition. Other accounts posit a range of instrumental and historical explanations for the phenomenon. Mumtaz Ahmad (1990, 137–180) focuses on a transactional relationship between religious actors and conservative businessmen, with the latter providing financial support for the former’s causes. This financial support is given in exchange for status legitimization and the material advantages accrued from customers based on perceptions of piety and honesty within the marketplace. My own research with religious groups in a small town of Punjab adds a contemporary dimension to Ahmed’s analysis by factoring in the role of heightened Muslim anxieties

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in a post-9/11 world, alongside the instrumental status gains that condition the public assertion of Islamic belief in the marketplace (Javed 2018). Comparatively, this relationship between religious actors and conservative businessmen is better documented in the case of other Muslim countries. In Iran, according to Arang Keshavarzian (2007, 42), the upper echelons of the bazaar and the clergy share a bond due to a common class and ethnic background, as well as a great deal of inter-marriage. Beyond the familial connection, there is also a functional link between the two. Religious leaders utilized the bazaar’s economic power to shape outcomes during the 1979 Revolution, while bazaaris (traders) relied on religious leaders and practices such as the Hajj (pilgrimage) to provide social and moral legitimacy for their businesses. Following the upheaval of the late 1970s, bazaar traders became closely embedded with the ruling elite that emerged in the post-revolution context in Iran. Due to the financial support provided to the religious associations, and the mobilization efforts within the marketplace, the theological elite in Iran counted the bazaar as one of the strongest pillars of regime support and relied on it to enhance social stability in the post-revolution scenario (Parsa 1988). Similarly, the religious association with the marketplace gained further currency after 1979 due to the occupational background of the Holy Prophet (PBUH) as a trader in Mecca and the benefit of publicly following his practice. In the marketplace of a conservative Muslim country, the notions of virtue and piety translate well into business practices and relations, as do the accumulation of social capital by traders and merchants (Keshavarzian 2007, 139). Similarly, conservative bazaaris were key participants with the clergy in the mobilization against the Shah’s regime in Iran in the late 1970s, and they continued to act as a source of strength for a theocratic order beyond the revolution (Ashraf 1988; Parsa 1995).1 Similar studies in Turkey documented the role of religion and cultural assertion in social and political transformations that feature a new conservative commercial elite. In particular, the Anatolian small and medium-­ sized entrepreneurs of Turkey, who ascribe to an assertive form of public religiosity, operate as a core electorate for the Islamists, both in the contemporary Justice and Development Party (AKP), as well as in its previous, more fundamentalist, iterations (Demiralp 2009; Gumuscu 2010). 1  However, Smith (2003) warns against an exclusive focus on the bazaar’s relationship with the clergy, as internal differentiation meant that it also mobilized with a range of other actors during the revolution.

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These insights from other countries in the region point to an oft-­ ignored sociological aspect of religious revivalism in Pakistan, which is its actual manifestation in everyday material and cultural urban practices. While Islamism remains enshrined in Pakistan’s juridical apparatus through purposeful interventions by the State elite and the Islamists, the contemporary popularity of Islamic ideals among both dominant and marginalized groups cannot be traced back to the State, alone. In Pakistan, the process of re-orientation has seen the rise of Islamist civil society, which includes revivalist and self-purification movements as well as religious charities that seek to transform Islam’s role within the lived experience of (predominantly) urban communities. These efforts are championed by large (and in some cases, transnational) proselytizing organizations, such as the Deobandi sect’s Tableeghi Jamaat or the Barelvi sect’s equivalent, Dawat-e-Islami.2 Complementary movements that seek to popularize religious purification in middle-class women, such as Al-Huda, have also emerged and become considerably popular in recent years (Babar 2008; Ahmad 2009).3 Some class-based aspects of the civil society turn in Pakistan’s religious field are also worth highlighting in order to appreciate its key impact and to illuminate the role of particular societal groups in its reproduction. The success of larger organizations like Tableeghi Jamaat and the Dawat-i-­ Islami in attracting dedicated followings has helped spawn a host of smaller community-based movements that operate within highly localized settings. For both, the control of mosques, madrassahs, and religious charities is central in engaging with their core target market: Muslim men. While followers from propertied classes, such as businessmen and white-­ collar professionals, are more coveted targets because of their availability, influence, and financial resources, the proliferation of smaller mosques, madrassahs, and affiliated charities in public spaces like bazaars has also helped to increase direct and indirect contact with marginalized groups (Bano 2012). Between 1988 and 2002, the number of registered Deobandi (Wafaq-ul-Madaris) and Barelvi (Tanzeem-ul-Madaris) madrassahs increased by 244 percent, from 2496 to 8585 (Institute of Policy Studies 2  These two organizations are rivals within the religious field, and their doctrinal affiliations (Deobandi vs. Barelvi) map on to the reformist split within Sunni Islam in the subcontinent that emerged and hardened over the last two centuries (Philippon 2014). 3  For more on Islamic revivalism and piety movements among Muslim women, see Mahmood (2005).

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2002). While there is no corresponding data for growth in mosques and unregistered madrassahs, it can be reasonably assumed to be of a similar scale, if not higher. Therefore, the pervasiveness of key physical sites of interaction among preachers, religious ideologues, and different class segments is instrumental in popularizing ideas about religious self-­purification and piety.4

Fieldwork in Mustafa Market, Shah Alam Bazaar The material presented in this chapter was collected as part of 14-month-­ long fieldwork in Lahore for a larger project that looked at politics and practices of accumulation in the informal economy. Much of this fieldwork took place within the congested confines of a marketplace section called Mustafa Market, located inside Lahore’s largest wholesale district, the Shah Alam bazaar.5 This choice was partly conditioned by the fact that I wanted to study a densely populated, inner-city commercial neighborhood, where cross-class relations operate simultaneously in the conjoined places of work and residence. This provided me with the chance to observe various actors and their political and social dynamics across different events, such as religious festivities and local elections. My entry into Mustafa Market was through a commerce beat reporter working for a local, Lahore-based newspaper, who I met due to a prior affiliation with news media in Pakistan. He frequently covered events hosted by the traders’ association in Mustafa Market (the Anjuman-i-­ Tajran Mustafa Market or ATMM) and was thus able to introduce me to the head of the association, Malik Khalid. Over the following 10 months from my first entry in Mustafa Market, I made on average two visits a week, to spend time with the traders, laborers, and religious actors who operated in the neighborhood. I documented their everyday interactions and activities and sat through the events and proceedings organized by their traders’ associations, such as religious festivities and dinner receptions. All in all, this particular chapter draws on interviews with 17 bazaar 4  The role of mosque and madrassah networks in perpetuating Islamist radicalism and militancy is also the subject of considerable academic and policy concern. Extant research shows that while a direct relationship to militancy is true in only a minority of cases (Christine Fair 2007), many religious sites are strong enablers of exclusionary and illiberal tendencies that lead to, among other things, the victimization of minority groups (Javed 2018). 5  “Mustafa Market” is a pseudonym for one of Shah Alam’s constituent markets, designated to protect key identifiers of my informants.

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traders, 6 religious actors (prayer leaders, mosque administrators, and representatives of Islamic charities and revivalist organization), and 11 workers and laborers who were employed in the bazaar. My experience as an academic attempting an immersive study of a large marketplace was not without complications. Traders and merchants were initially reluctant to converse with me for two reasons. The first is the undocumented nature of most economic activity in the bazaar sector, which makes businessmen wary of covert attempts by the tax bureaucracy to document their actual revenue flows. After I gained the familiarity of some traders, one of them told me that I had initially been perceived as a researcher from the Ministry of Finance and had been using academic research as a false pretext.6 The second reason was that while I spoke the same languages (Punjabi and Urdu) and belonged to the same city, my acculturation as a suburban, somewhat-Anglicized, white-collar individual was at odds with the material and cultural formation of inner-city commercial spaces. I was an “outsider” to them and, furthermore, was of no use to most of my respondents in economic and social capital terms. Thus, they saw no immediate benefit in entertaining my research.7 However, after a few visits and a persistent campaign from my end, I managed to convince Malik Khalid and his deputy, Shahid Aslam, of the solely academic nature of my work. While this process did not immediately guarantee my access to everyone in the marketplace, their reference and occasional support in getting others to talk to me proved to be helpful. My approach to interviewing followed the general pattern of snowball sampling. I asked my early entry-points to connect me to their friends in the market, who then connected me with their own networks, and so on. However, I soon realized that I was circulating within one particular faction of the traders’ association.8 To rectify this, I reached out to a contact at the Lahore Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI) who connected me to another set of traders within Mustafa Market. Luckily, my early incursions with one faction were not held against me. In fact, it 6  They also admitted that they soon realized that I wasn’t from the government, since no public servant would be bothered enough to visit more than a couple of times. 7  Unlike in some cultural formations, academics are a low-status group in Pakistan, and the predominant perception is that a failure to succeed in other occupational forms pushes one toward teaching and research as a vocation. 8  These factions were grounded in business and fraternal ties, rather than caste- or kinshipbased differentiation, and it was not uncommon for traders to switch allegiances from time to time.

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encouraged traders from the opposing faction to talk more freely so that they could rectify misconceptions they felt I had been fed by their rivals. I also made sure to reach out to those traders who were not actively affiliated with either of the two factions. The working poor in Mustafa Market were the most difficult to interview. Most traders were unwilling to give their workers time off to speak to me, while street vendors and hawkers rarely found themselves with free time on their hands. My strategy then was to approach them during their lunch or tea breaks for brief 15–20-minute conversations and set up more detailed conversations on their day off, Sunday.9 There was also the additional aspect of workers and vendors being less forthcoming with any of their work-related details, including those regarding traders, simply because of fear of being caught out. My position and access in Mustafa Market was identified as a favor granted by the traders, in general, and the senior ATMM office-bearers, in particular, who kept a reasonably close watch on my activities. Thus, it was naturally expected that I was beholden to them and would pass on any untoward opinions that I encountered in my conversations elsewhere. After a while, though, my persistence and attempts at establishing transparency of relations led several workers and vendors to become more forthcoming, and some even suggested that I write about our conversations and highlight the problems workers faced in their neighborhoods.

Divine Privilege: Traders and Islam in Mustafa Market A hundred meters before the turning for Shah Alam bazaar, on the perpetually congested Circular Road, is a shopping plaza that towers four floors above all other buildings in its surrounding. Adorning its left wall is a 200-square foot hoarding featuring a headshot of former Member of the  Provincial  Assembly (MPA), All-Pakistan  Anjuman  Tajran (APAT) President, and leader of the Shah Alam traders’ board, Haji Maqsood Ahmed Butt. Underneath the picture is some text: “Haji Maqsood Butt, 1944–2010,” a few Quranic verses, and a large inscription that reads “Khadim-e-Data-Darbar; Khadim-e-Darbar Pir Syed Mitha Sharif (Servant of the Data Darbar Shrine; Servant of the Shrine of Pir Mitha Sharif).” The board was put up by his three sons shortly after his death in 9  These conversations would take place in public spaces, like a park on Circular Road, or a tea-stall in Mustafa Market, as most workers also lived in the surrounding neighborhood.

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November 2010, and the location was chosen specifically to ensure that it was missed by no one entering Shah Alam bazaar. Over the course of his lifetime, Haji Maqsood wore several caps and held various public offices, including one as advisor to the Punjab Chief Minister, but his sons chose to commemorate him for his work in the religious sphere. This, it turns out, was a request from the deceased in the last few months of his life. As one of his sons, who was now the Lahore president of the APAT, mentioned, Haji sahib was always a religious person but became even more so in the last few years. During this phase, he had some ilhaam (sixth sense) that he would get ill, and his time in this life was about to end. Knowing this, he stressed upon all of us (his sons) that all of his successes in life—the thriving businesses, societal respect, political legitimacy—were because he remained faithful to Allah, the Prophet, and the pious who propagated Islam’s message. Without his contribution to religious causes, such as the upkeep of the shrines, nothing else would’ve been possible. It made sense for him to be remembered for what was most important, din (faith) over dunya (the material).10

Haji Maqsood’s son’s forceful reiteration of his father’s religiosity conveyed both the importance of Islamic belief in the lives of successful businessmen and, as his well-advertised contributions to the upkeep of the city’s largest Sufi shrine demonstrated, the corresponding publicness of these acts. The fact that his legacy, as per his own apparent wishes, was interwoven with religious service and displayed with considerable prominence highlights not just the centrality of adherence but also of attendant concerns around public image and status. The amalgamation of religious acts with business (and politics) in Haji Maqsood’s life provides a useful example of a widely pervasive phenomenon. Throughout Mustafa Market, the rest of Shah Alam bazaar, or any other marketplace in Lahore, a close-knit relationship between Islamist civil society (religious actors and their movements) and bazaar traders unfolds on a daily basis. This section turns to this relationship and draws on fieldwork in Mustafa Market to show how bazaar traders intervene in the religious field, formulate and reproduce their pious public image, and, consequently, help shape the cultural experience and frames of the urban poor in the marketplace. To this end, the next three subsections focus on  Interview, 3 August 2015.

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three processes through which this phenomenon plays out. The first are acts of everyday piety and bazaar traders’ relations with mosques and religious charities, which highlight the close social relationships that underscore religious assertion in the public sphere. The second relates to shared religious experiences among dominant and subaltern groups in the marketplace (i.e., workers and traders), which emerge through the conduct and conversation of everyday life and business. Finally, the third section identifies the importance of collective participation in religious ceremonies for reaffirming hierarchies and entrenching authority positions. Din and Dunya: The Business of Religion in the Marketplace Islam is everywhere in Mustafa Market. It is present in the shape of not one, but two mosques located within its narrow confines, one of each sect, Deobandi and Barelvi. It is visible in the shape of ubiquitous religious imagery adorning the walls of its constituent shops and offices, such as tiles with the names of Allah and the Prophet, pictures of Gumbad-i-­ Khizra (the green dome of the Prophet’s mosque and burial site in Medina) and the Kaaba, and calligraphic inscriptions of popular Quranic verses and Prophetic sayings (see Fig.  12.1). Outside the walled confines of their businesses, the streets and alleyways are dotted with banners, fliers, and posters proclaiming support for some international Islamic cause (Iraq, Gaza, and Kashmir being the most popular), preaching some religious injunction or warning against some slippage of faith. It is also visible through the flowing beards sported by a majority of traders through their Haji honorifics, prayer skullcap covered heads, and the “MashAllah (God has willed),” “SubhanAllah (Praise be to Allah),” or “Alhamdulilah (Grateful to Allah)” peppering their conversations. All traders I observed and spoke to repeatedly stressed the importance and centrality of Islamic belief in their personal identity as well as their occupational choice. A frequent refrain herein was the consecration of trading and mercantilist activity as a virtuous occupation, as dictated by the edicts and sunnat (tradition) of the Prophet. Traders in Mustafa Market and other bazaars served frequent reminders that the Prophet himself had found work operating trading caravans on behalf of his uncle, and so by undertaking this particular occupation they were bringing themselves closer to the only lifestyle worth emulating in Islamic belief. In support of this view, traders frequently narrated sayings ascribed to the Prophet, which stressed the inherent virtuosity of honest trade as an

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Fig. 12.1  The inscription reads: “Oh Allah, Please keep my country safe”— sponsored by Haji Hanif, the head of a local traders’ association. (Photo by author)

occupation, with the most popular one stating that “honest traders would stand just behind the Prophet, his family, and his closest companions on the day of judgement.” This and other related hadith (guidance conveyed by the Prophet Muhammad) were displayed as framed inscriptions on the walls of several shops in Mustafa Market. Traders’ practice of Islam placed importance on specific types of religious activities, which became central in shaping their status as pious elites. Apart from the usual practice of saying at least three of the daily five prayers collectively in the marketplace mosque, the importance devoted to pilgrimage and religious charitable acts was also a vital component. Similar to the narration of Haji Maqsood Butt’s son detailed earlier, many traders linked personal prosperity with their willingness to publicly spend on religious endeavors. One trader, for example, narrated his life story about how his business was faltering until he decided to go for Hajj. Sitting in front of the Kaaba in Mecca, he prayed for an improvement in his

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fortunes, which he soon encountered upon his return to Lahore. Within three months of the pilgrimage, he had secured a lucrative procurement contract, which was viewed and openly acknowledged as a direct response to his prayers.11 Alongside this exalted status accorded to Hajj (and Umrah), charitable donations to religious organizations constituted a key tenet of traders’ activities in the cultural sphere of the marketplace. The scale of charitable giving varied depending on the financial health and clout of the businesses. Nearly all small and mid-sized traders gave small but regular amounts—mostly between Rs. 5000 and 10,000 per month—to religious causes of their choice and also encouraged their customers to do so through chanda (donation) boxes placed in prominent locations in their shops. The most popular charities in Mustafa Market were those affiliated with Barelvi evangelical organizations, such as the Mehfil-i-Mustafa Foundation, Minhaj-ul-Quran, Dawat-i-Islami, or Markazi Jamaat Ahle Sunnat, who used the money primarily to maintain their mosques, madrassahs, and proselytizing networks and, to a lesser extent, to provide food, medicine, and other essential goods in impoverished areas of Pakistan. The few traders in the marketplace who ascribed to Deobandi or Salafi practices chose to support charitable organizations from their own sects, such as the Jamaat-i-Islami’s Al-Khidmat Foundation or the Falah-i-­ Insaniyat Foundation.12 Compared to the smaller traders, the involvement of Mustafa Market’s elite traders in charitable enterprise was grander in scale and operated through a variety of channels. The ATMM head, Malik Khalid, was on the Lahore city management committee of an Islamic charity that had a presence throughout the province of Punjab, and he had an important voice in determining where and for what purposes the money was spent. Another elite trader, Khwaja Athar, who headed the Ittehad faction of the ATMM in the market, was a key sponsor of a mosque-based charity located just outside of Shah Alam bazaar that financed marriage and dowry expenses for women from destitute households in Lahore’s Walled City. Every  Interview, 7 September 2015.  This practice of donating money to religious organizations seen in Mustafa Market is in line with trends across the country. While survey data for other provinces is hard to come by, the Pakistan Centre of Philanthropy’s (PCP) research for Punjab shows that 38% of all monetary charitable contributions—an estimated Rs. 21 billion per  annum—is channeled into “Islamic organizations and mosque and madrassah construction committees” (Pakistan Centre for Philanthropy 2012, 22). 11 12

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couple of months, he would raise funds from his relatives, friends, and other traders in the marketplace and then host a ceremony in his shop where he would hand over a donation check to the mosque administrator. Pictures and press clippings of previous such ceremonies were displayed on one wall of the shop, showing that the practice had been going on for at least the past three years. Elite traders were also major patrons of mosques and were involved in their administration and management, both in the bazaar and in its neighboring areas. The mosque committee of the Ghaus-e-Azam Masjid, one of the two main mosques in Mustafa Market, had among its members three elite traders including the Vice-Chairman of the ATMM, Shahid Aslam. Similar to the workings of mosque committees documented elsewhere in Lahore (Naveeda Khan 2003, 176–177), these traders were responsible for overseeing the finances and administrative matters of the mosque and subsequently carried considerable influence in determining the substantive and theological content of mosque sermons and other associated religious activity. Given that the khateeb (prayer leader) at Ghaus-e-Azam Masjid was reliant on the goodwill of the market’s traders for both his salary and his mosque’s material needs, it made him more amenable to certain types of ideological messages.13 The khateeb openly admitted to mushavirat (consultation) as the primary way of how he chose the content of his sermons. This involved discussing broad themes with the traders on the mosque committee every few weeks, and then weaving them with passages from the Quran or narrations from the Prophet’s life. In his view, this process was necessary because traders (and not workers or other subordinate groups) constituted his primary audience and he had to ensure the sermons were relevant and agreeable to them. Friday prayer sermons, usually broadcast from the mosque’s loudspeaker and consumed by all present in the marketplace, were remarkable for their alignment with traders’ interests. These important messages never broached the issue of the rights of employees and poor workers guaranteed by Islamic tradition or any other potential source of class-based, conflictual messaging. Instead, they frequently stressed the importance of self-purification and individual charitable giving—zakat and sadqa—as appropriate ways of securing future material and spiritual prosperity. Similarly, another common theme of sermonizing that papered over  Interview 15 October 2015.

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socio-economic distinctions, one popularized by Islamist political and civil society over the preceding three decades, were the global challenges facing the collective Muslim ummah (community). It was claimed that these challenges arose from personal weaknesses and diversions from faith, which could be witnessed at the root of matters as diverse as urban poverty and the war in Afghanistan. On several occasions during my fieldwork, the khateeb overtly reciprocated the benevolence of his patrons in the marketplace by highlighting and publicizing their religious achievements and contributions. Hajj and Umrah returnees were greeted by post-prayer loudspeaker announcements heralding their success in meeting a key tenet of faith. Similarly, in April 2015, after several ATMM’s office-bearers donated a new drinking water fountain and financed the refurbishment of the public ablution section in the mosque, the khateeb put up a gratitude banner on the mosque entrance and provided them with space in the refurbished section to put up a plaque listing names of all the donors. One trader rationalized this status-seeking behavior as a form of demonstrative encouragement and positive competition: Islamic tradition does not categorically instruct only one way of giving charity. There are plenty of examples from the Prophet’s time when the sahaba (companions) gave their wealth publicly to help grow and strengthen Islam. The Prophet encouraged them in this regard, so that they could serve as role models for others. If today, someone here wants to build a mosque or help the poor, he should do it publicly so that it serves as an example for others in the market. In fact, it encourages an ikhlaaqi (moral) competition within the tajir biraderi, which is better than competing over who has the latest model of mobile phone or who owns a bigger car that we normally see these days!14

As the trader asserted, charitable giving and its public representation was part of the general cultural code that operated within the bazaar. It was both a language of competition among traders, as he suggested, but also a central way of defining the very position of the business elite in the marketplace vis-à-vis other actors within and outside the immediate setting. This is an important reason why only a handful of traders acted discreetly with regard to their interventions in the religious domain, either in terms of charitable giving or in terms of their ritualistic practices, even though  Interview, 29 September 2015.

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there are numerous Islamic injunctions that encourage discretion and anonymity. The highly routinized and publicized relationships between bazaar traders and religious civil society described here constitute an integral source of how ideas about public piety and Islamic civic virtue are fashioned and embedded within the urban cultural sphere and how they influence cross-class relations, as well. The crucial factors here are the spatial and material dynamics of the marketplace, itself. Shop workers and other marginalized groups worked long hours in the bazaar, held shared religious experiences with traders, and were both observers and recipients of patronage and charitable giving. Thus, their own frames of understanding of material conditions and the authority of bazaar traders were shaped in this particular environment. One important example of this phenomenon came out during interviews with workers who pointed out how elite traders used their wealth, influence, and social stature for the wider community and not just for their employees. As narrated by my respondents from among the marginalized groups of the bazaar, this notion was underscored by the view that poverty and hardship were a divine test (rather than a social outcome) that would be compensated in akhirat (afterlife), while those who had wealth—such as the prosperous traders of Mustafa Market—were bound by religious obligation to spend it according to divine guidance. As one interviewee stated, In difficult moments, we turn to others (such as the elite traders) for help. We feel like someone else will be a sahara (support), like our family, or biraderi or someone in the neighbourhood. While all of this is important, it should not come at the expense of asking the real giver (Allah). Those who have it (wealth and status), have it because of the One above. They should spend their time saying shukr (gratitude) and expending their wealth in His way. Those who don’t have it, don’t have it because He deems it so. In return, they should practice patience, and ask Him for help. Usko dunya mein nahi toh akhirat mein toh zaroor mile ga (If not in the present, he will be rewarded in the afterlife).15

On the same issue of privilege and divine obligation, another respondent gave the example of how ATMM’s head, Malik Khalid, had intervened when the anti-encroachment operation took away the source of livelihood  Interview 11 October 2015.

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for push-cart vendors and hawkers. Similarly, I was told there were a number of traders who had helped out other low-income residents of the Shah Alam neighborhood in accessing basic utilities, like electricity, or helping get through to unresponsive public officials. Many of these accounts frequently moved beyond material patronage and mentioned the religious activities of bazaar traders, such as their charitable giving to religious causes, visits to Data Darbar and other shrines, and their frequent pilgrimages to Mecca and Medina. The fact that many of the traders referred to themselves as Hajis (honorific tacked onto their names upon completing the Hajj) also helped in raising their profile and stature among a population who effusively desired it but knew they would never be able to afford a trip to Saudi Arabia. Practicing Piety, Consecrating Status: Shared Religious Experience Shared religious experiences among traders and the urban poor constituted a key aspect of the broader processes of status reproduction in the bazaar. These cross-class interactions stand in contrast to other accounts of religious practice across different social classes in Pakistan that focus on the divergence between “elite” Islam and “subaltern” Islam in both urban and rural areas. Ammara Maqsood’s (2014, 2017) work on Lahore’s upwardly mobile middle class details the importance of literacy in Arabic and Urdu, as well as the use of technological aides in contemporary Quran classes, all of which lead to shared understandings of religion among these groups. Crucially, the pervading ambition in such classes is a reversion to “true Islam,” which is free from the impurities and heterodoxies that have emerged in South Asian religious practice over the centuries. A frequent target of such cleansing movements is the centrality accorded by many poor Muslims to shrines and their pirs (spiritual leaders and caretakers), who are viewed as divine interlocutors and helpers. Prosperous adherents of Islamic orthodoxy, such as those studied by Maqsood (2017, 125), categorize these practices as bidat (impurity) or even shirk (apostasy) that have to be resisted and reformed, thus fortifying strong symbolic boundaries between themselves and subordinate classes. Divergent practices of Islam between elites and subalterns have also been found in rural Punjab (Martin 2015, 145–167). In exploring the idea of whether shrines are responsible for creating ideological dominance of powerful landlords, Martin posits that while a broader belief in Islamic

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ideas does suppress the subordinate classes’ political assertions, the particularistic claims of cultural leadership made by landed elites are frequently contested by the rural poor, who draw on and prioritize different ideals and practices from within the Islamic tradition. Landlords place extra emphasis on exoteric ritualistic purity, scriptural adherence, and a hierarchical vision of spirituality. In contrast, the landless engage in esoteric practices of devotion that help them make sense of their material world and question the landed elite’s claims on spiritual superiority. Class influenced religious priorities and beliefs in Mustafa Market, as well. Traders placed extra emphasis on routinized rituals and doctrinal adherence by praying five times a day and followed key codes of personal appearance, such as wearing their shalwars (trousers) above the ankle, carrying skull caps or turbans, and sporting manicured (and at times, hennaed) beards without mustaches. In contrast, workers were less regular with their daily praying habits due to time constraints, and they did not have the material resources to maintain what were commonly deemed to be Islamic standards of personal hygiene and appearance. Similarly, traders were interested in contemporary expositions on Islamic business ethics and practices, especially those covering finance and usury. The issue of whether Islamic banks were any better than regular banks in moral terms and whether formalized banking, itself, should even be engaged with was a subject of frequent debate among traders and between traders and Islamic clerics. Due to longstanding hurdles imposed by banks through literacy and employment evidence requirements, the urban poor had no interaction with formal financial institutions and were thus far removed from any such theological concerns. Alongside these differences, however, were several structural similarities that engendered shared cultural experiences within the marketplace. As already mentioned, a majority of traders, like their workers and other marginalized actors in the bazaar, adhered to Sufi Barelvi conceptions about Islam, which prioritized devotional worship, urged emulation of the Prophet’s lifestyle, and consecrated shrines as integral sites of religious virtue.16 This communal adherence is fairly unique among propertied 16  This was particularly true for older businessmen, who themselves were first- or secondgeneration urban migrants. A few younger traders, including those who joined their fathers and uncles in business, were somewhat more amenable to puritanical and orthodox interpretations, which they encountered in schools and universities. However, they constituted a much smaller segment of the bazaar, and Barelvi beliefs were still firmly entrenched with the majority of traders.

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groups within urban Pakistan, given how white-collar professionals and even segments of the manufacturing elite have gravitated toward orthodox Deobandi and Salafi interpretations in recent decades (Khan 2016). Therefore, unlike the symbolic divide instituted by middle-class orthodoxy, fortification of ideological boundaries between classes—through differences in religious practice—was less apparent in the marketplace. Time constraints placed by their businesses meant that attending exclusive Quran classes or taking up a serious analysis of religious texts was not a viable option for traders. Even though most were literate, only a small percentage had attended college or university and most did not feel the need for personal scholastic engagement. A few traders that I interviewed mentioned that they studied the Quran in their free time and a couple said they even taught it to those shop workers who had some schooling. However, the pervasiveness of this practice appeared highly limited due to illiteracy and perpetual time constraints. Far more common was the practice of traders imbibing and narrating quotations and anecdotes in everyday conversations, including those with workers, which were picked up from TV and mosque sermons, and summaries of Quranic exegesis found in Islamic self-purification books like Faizan-e-Sunnat.17 These everyday conversations, grounded as they were in a shared belief system, proved to be an integral source of how Islamic ideas were popularized in the bazaar. Over the course of my time in Mustafa Market, I observed traders acting as interlocutors for workers, informing them about current events and providing their own causal interpretations. A popular time for this was during lunch or tea breaks, which usually featured the day’s news on a television or a radio as a backdrop. Usual subjects were drawn from domestic and international politics, such as economic conditions, the fate of the current government, or the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS). Traders’ interpretation and analysis often included a peppering of religious anecdotes and sayings of the Prophet—especially those concerning divine fate and individual moral decay—thus linking ideas popularized by Islamist civil society to contemporary material realities. For example, in May 2015, TV news channels in Pakistan ran regular segments on the disastrous impact of drought in the Tharparkar district of 17  The Faizan-e-Sunnat is a two-volume, 2200-page book by Barelvi scholar and Dawat-iIslami founder, Muhammad Ilyas Qadri. It contains detailed instructions on how to live a life that approximates that of the Prophet and how to earn favor from Allah on the basis of everyday good deeds.

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Sindh province. The imagery in the broadcast was particularly disturbing, as it showed young children suffering from starvation with many reported to have died due to dysfunctional medical facilities. In one shop, the event became the source of considerable discussion between a trader and two of his friends in the market who had joined him for lunch. Also present at this gathering were three warehouse workers, one of whom asked the trader to explain how this had happened. All three businessmen immediately cited corruption by the be-hiss (apathetic) Sindh government politicians and officials as a fundamental reason. While everyone was in broad agreement over this, one trader also added a moral dimension to the explanation. In his view, the crippling drought was because he had heard from a reliable source in the mosque that Muslims in Tharparkar were marrying Hindus (who constituted a significant portion of the district’s population) and converting to Hinduism, themselves. Thus, this drought should be seen as a form of divine retribution. To bolster his point, he also narrated a popular Islamic fable of how throughout human history Allah had used natural disasters as a form of punishment for populations that had strayed far from faith. One worker remarked that surely there would’ve been quite a few people there who were still pious in their practices, and yet they too were being punished. To this, the trader who had sermonized earlier responded with the pervasive adage about present-day material suffering as a great example of hikmat, or grand fate designed by Allah, which humans cannot understand. The other traders murmured their agreement, constituting an informal consensus, and asked everyone present to keep praying and offering durood (blessings for the Prophet) so they would remain safe from any such punishment. My interviews with workers showed that these conversations, and the ensuing consensus of moral interpretation, shaped workers’ perceptions of traders’ status. Workers commonly described traders as nek (pious) and manan-walay (believer), terms that indicated workers’ recognition and general acceptance of the pious credentials that traders actively cultivated.18 When I further probed this generally pious perception of traders, workers explained with reference to the kinds of routines and behaviors mentioned earlier. A few workers gave examples of the material assistance traders gave to religious causes, such as the Milaads or the patronage and 18  In contrast, government officials and politicians were referred to as badmaash (villainous) and khaoo (corrupt), among other, stronger expletives.

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official access they had received from them, as an indicator of their proximity to faith and their overall societal influence. In their view, traders who helped out those in need were accurately following examples from Islamic history regarding the appropriate way to spend material and social resources that Allah had granted them. This attitude toward the poor was often contrasted with stories of or encounters with other dominant actors who were far less generous. One worker who had moved to Lahore almost a decade ago mentioned that his previous employer, who ran a small power loom mill in Kot Lakhpat industrial area, would only allow two bathroom breaks in a 12-hour shift and would frequently lock the doors of the building to discourage employees from getting out during working hours. In comparison, he mentioned that while he was finding it hard to make ends meet at his current wage, he was grateful that his current employer practiced no such coercive methods.19 Similarly, workers who had migrated from rural areas favorably compared the attitude of bazaar traders with agrarian landlords who, despite being more influential and entrenched in structures of power, were far less charitable when it came to their tenants and workers. This was largely due to their “distance” from pious religious practice. During a group conversation, one worker narrated a story he’d heard of the son of a landlord from a neighboring village who would get drunk during the day and set his hunting dogs to chase children of farm workers as a form of entertainment. As everyone voiced their disgust with the story, another worker, who had been employed in Mustafa Market for seven years, chimed in with a contrasting story. He pointed out that a trader, who had since shut down his business, once physically assaulted a worker on charges of theft but was immediately admonished for doing so by his neighboring traders. This immediate and pervasive reaction against the act of coercion among others in the community was viewed as exemplifying the moral norm in opposition to the aberration of cruelty. Such conversations were often characterized by an array of emotions and subjectivities, but several themes crop up repeatedly across a range of respondents from among the working poor. These include personal identification as part of a wider Muslim community, which encompassed groups from all sorts of social and occupational backgrounds, the 19  Akhtar (2011, 222) also points out the frequent positing of a framework of ihsaan (favor) by subordinate groups in their dealings with employers and patrons in the urban economy.

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individualized reversion to “true faith” as a solution to a wide variety of ills, from material corruption to Western imperialism, and finally, a recurring belief in the divinely ordained nature of material inequities and hardship, which could only truly be mitigated or resolved through religious self-purification and patience. Grounded in these frames of understanding is a fraught view of bazaar traders as pious patrons who utilize divinely granted wealth for morally upright purposes. It is this legitimization of their authority along the lines of Islamic virtue that lies at the core of the hierarchical relationship between traders and the urban poor in the bazaar. Status, Authority, and Religious Ceremony Finally, apart from the charitable endeavors and everyday discourses detailed earlier, processes of ideological diffusion and legitimization of authority also took place through shared participation in religious ceremonies. The most frequent were the Mehfil-i-Milaad celebrations held to commemorate the Prophet’s life and tradition. Traders and (in particular) bazaar elites who associated with the ATMM were the principal sponsors of these events, contributing thousands of rupees from their own pockets. All of the celebrations I attended followed the same basic format.20 Carpets were rolled out to cover the main market road, and a stage was set up on one end. Popular naat-khwans—individuals who sing hymns or naats in praise of the Prophet—were hired to recite naats and verses from the Holy Quran. The main event itself was usually a dars (sermon) or a bayaan (narration) by a senior cleric from an established Barelvi madrassah, such as the Jamia Nizamia Rizvia, located a short distance away from the Shah Alam neighborhood. Workers, push-cart vendors, and other marginalized groups in the bazaar were avid attendees of such events. To them, the Milaad constituted both a religious obligation and a form of public entertainment. The spatial arrangement gave the entire marketplace a festive feel, while the naats offered a musical value, given how they were composed along the tunes of popular Bollywood (Indian cinema) music. Also of considerable

20  There were five held during my fieldwork year out of which I was able to attend three. The most extravagant one was on 4 January 2015 (12th Rabi-ul-Awal, commonly known as Eid Milad-un-Nabi or the Prophet’s day of birth), and it received significant coverage on a local Lahore-based television channel as well as in the press.

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appeal was the provision of a free dinner, usually chicken curry, sweet rice, and bread made in degs (large steel drums). Many of the ideas and norms popularized by Islamists were repeated through the dars and bayaans at the Milaad. Continual stress was placed on the importance of reviving a pan-Islamic collective identity, engaging in self-purification, and understanding the irrelevance of material disparity in the face of religious worship. A frequent refrain along these lines was that ameer aur ghareeb dono aaqa ke darbar mein barabar hain (the poor and the rich are same in the eyes of the Prophet). The intention behind such statements was to highlight the fact that wealth and prosperity did not automatically guarantee a higher status in Islam, which could only be attained through worship. However, an inadvertent impact of this discourse was that it flattened out the aspect of real, material inequities and elevated the importance of religious belief and ritual instead. Simultaneously, these events were similar to the charitable endeavors described earlier in legitimizing the authority of bazaar traders along religious lines. Those traders who organized Milaads put up their own pictures on the banners that publicized them, making sure that everyone in the marketplace could see their integral role in the event. During the event itself, the naat-khwans and the clerics made a special note of naming and thanking all those who had invited (and paid) them, proclaiming that they had earned Allah’s blessings by spending their money on such virtuous activity. These acts played an important part in shaping status hierarchies, with traders being viewed by workers and other members of the bazaar public as both spiritually elevated individuals and as class superiors due to their extensive, and very public, expenditure on religious events. However, it is important to reiterate that these legitimizing frames and perceptions do not exist as essential or ahistorical attributes of the bazaar’s marginalized groups. On the contrary, as this section has shown, they have developed and crystallized from a wide variety of influences within the religio-­cultural field of the marketplace and its linkages to the rest of society.

Conclusion This chapter aimed to provide a correction to static, statist, and asocial understandings of contemporary Islamic revivalism in Pakistan. I have moved beyond explanations that posit Islamic revival as either an instrumental imposition by State elites or a timeless cultural artifact unmoored

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from structural transformations in society at large. To accomplish this, I have opened up the question of religion and its relationship with the material and social bases of urban class dynamics in the context of Pakistan. Fieldwork in Mustafa Market demonstrated that class reproduction is deeply interwoven with religio-cultural assertion, within a constituted ideational space dominated by ideas about collective Muslim identity, benevolent civic virtue and pious patronage, and cultural understanding of material inequities and hierarchies. The genealogy of reproductive ideas emanates in part from Pakistan’s experience with Islamism, wherein, since the 1980s, Islamist civil society has built on the juridical space offered by the State and popularized religious movements across a wide cross-section of society. However, there remains a strong localized component to the spread and popularity of religious ideals. In a setting like Mustafa Market, these ideas are further reproduced and entrenched through the relations exercised between religious actors, in mosques and charities, and the main dominant group, bazaar traders. The latter ultimately become prime beneficiaries of these ideas as their interventions in the religious sphere, which take the shape of charitable acts and sponsoring of religious events, help cultivate an image as pious elites in a particular social setting. Such images are further reinforced through the shared theological understandings and experiences of different groups within the marketplace. Therefore, the presence of Islam in the bazaar acts as legitimizing identity for the authority of propertied groups in the bazaar (traders), and it provides the moral frames and idioms that the urban poor use to understand their material troubles, as well as the patronage relations used to resolve them. This chapter’s attempt to explore the sociological dynamics of contemporary religious revivalism in Pakistan is naturally limited to one particular setting. However, it establishes the need for further reflection on the role played by “actually existing” Islam within social differentiation. Building on Ammara Maqsood’s (2014, 2017) narration of the importance of religious consumption in reaffirming gender and class identity among the upwardly mobile, the same dynamics need to be studied among other sections of the middle class, as well as in other localities where religious framing intersects with other ascriptive identities, such as ethnicity. Plausible sites for the latter are likely to be the multi-ethnic commercial spaces of more diverse Pakistani cities, like Karachi, Quetta, and Rawalpindi, where ethnic cleavages frequently assert themselves onto the political and economic domain and are often in competition with religious identity.

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Finally, the research presented here echoes methodological propositions of Tuğal (2009), Khan (2016), and Maqsood (2017) on the need to “socialize” the study of Islam in contemporary Muslim societies beyond a narrow focus on juridical manifestations and theological utterances by State elites, clerics, and Islamist ideologues. As the experience of traders and workers in Mustafa Market demonstrate, Islamic ritual observances intersect with, influence, and are influenced by a wide variety of socio-­ material phenomena. Directing our attention to these everyday facets may provide further insight on the complexity and rootedness of large-scale cultural dynamics.

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Fair, C.  Christine. 2011. The Militant Challenge in Pakistan. Asia Policy 11: 105–137. https://doi.org/10.1353/asp.2011.0010. Gumuscu, Sebnem. 2010. Class, Status, and Party: The Changing Face of Political Islam in Turkey and Egypt. Comparative Political Studies 43 (7): 835–861. https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414010361341. Institute of Policy Studies. 2002. Pakistan: Religious Education Institutions—An Overview. Islamabad: Institute of Policy Studies. Iqtidar, Humeira. 2011. Secularism Beyond the State: the ‘State’ and the ‘Market’ in Islamist Imagination. Modern Asian Studies 45 (3): 535–564. Jamal, Arif. 2014. Call for Transnational Jihad: Lashkar-e-Taiba 1985–2014. Atlanta, GA: Avant-Garde Books. Javed, Umair. 2018. Profit, Protest and Power: Bazaar Politics in Urban Pakistan. In The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Pakistan, ed. Aparna Pande, 148–159. London: Routledge. Keshavarzian, Arang. 2007. Bazaar and State in Iran: The Politics of the Tehran Marketplace. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Khan, Naveeda Ahmed. 2003. Grounding Sectarianism: Islamic Ideology and Muslim Everyday Life in Lahore, Pakistan Circa 1920s/1990s. PhD diss., Columbia University. Khan, Arsalan. 2016. Islam and Pious Sociality: The Ethics of Hierarchy in the Tablighi Jamaat in Pakistan. Social Analysis 60 (4). https://doi.org/10.3167/ sa.2016.600406. Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Maqsood, Ammara. 2014. ‘Buying Modern’ Muslim Subjectivity, the West and Patterns of Islamic Consumption in Lahore, Pakistan. Cultural Studies 28 (1): 84–107. ———. 2017. The New Pakistani Middle Class. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Martin, Nicolas. 2015. Politics, Landlords and Islam in Pakistan. New Delhi: Routledge. Ministry of Commerce. 2013. Review of Retail-Wholesale Sector. Islamabad: Govt. of Pakistan. Pakistan Bureau of Statistics. 2014. Labour Force Survey. Islamabad: Govt. of Pakistan. Pakistan Centre for Philanthropy. 2012. The State of Individual Philanthropy in Pakistan 2012. Islamabad: Pakistan Centre for Philanthropy. Parsa, Misagh. 1988. Theories of Collective Action and the Iranian Revolution. Sociological Forum 3 (1): 44–71. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf01115123. ———. 1995. Entrepreneurs and Democratization: Iran and the Philippines. Comparative Studies in Society and History 37 (4): 803–830. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500019964.

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Philippon, Alix. 2014. A Sublime, Yet Disputed, Object of Political Ideology? Sufism in Pakistan at the Crossroads. Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 52 (2): 271–292. https://doi.org/10.1080/14662043.2014.894284. Richter, William L. 1979. The Political Dynamics of Islamic Resurgence in Pakistan. Asian Survey 19 (6): 547–557. https://doi.org/10.2307/2643894. Shah, Aqil. 2014. The Army and Democracy: Military Politics in Pakistan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Smith, Benjamin B. 2003. Collective Action with and without Islam: Mobilizing the Bazaar in Iran. In Islamic Activism: A Social Movement Theory Approach, ed. Q. Wiktorowicz, 185–204. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Tuğal, Cihan. 2009. Passive Revolution. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Williams, Colin C., and Muhammad S. Shahid. 2014. Informal Entrepreneurship and Institutional Theory: Explaining the Varying Degrees of (in)Formalization of Entrepreneurs in Pakistan. Entrepreneurship & Regional Development 28 (1–2): 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/08985626.2014.963889. Ziring, Lawrence. 1984. From Islamic Republic to Islamic State in Pakistan. Asian Survey 24 (9): 931–946. https://doi.org/10.2307/2644077.

CHAPTER 13

“Bodybuilding Does Not Need American Certifications”: Cultural Entrepreneurship in Times of Globalization in Contemporary Bengal Jaita Talukdar

This chapter would not have been possible without the men and women interviewees of this study who took time out of their extremely busy work schedules to talk to me. For their engaged responses, I am deeply grateful. I would also like to extend my thanks to Smitha Radhakrishnan and Gowri Vijayakumar for their careful consideration of my manuscript and thoughtful feedback. A special thanks to Loyola University New Orleans for their generous support through the Marquette Faculty Research Fellowship and Bobet Fellowship that enabled me to write the first drafts of this chapter. My biggest thank you, however, is reserved for my husband Leopold Eisenlohr who took on extra responsibilities of childcare at home, as I worked on this chapter in the middle of a pandemic. J. Talukdar (*) Department of Sociology, Loyola University New Orleans, New Orleans, LA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Radhakrishnan, G. Vijayakumar (eds.), Sociology of South Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97030-7_13

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In the course of analyzing the physical culture of the Indian subcontinent between 1820 and 1990, Joseph Alter provides us with a fascinating account of how the swinging of batons in gymnastic-styled drill exercises that became popular in late nineteenth-century Europe actually owes its origin to the rural sport of the “Indian club exercise,” or the swinging of stylized wooden clubs known as the jodi. Swinging of wooden clubs was a manly sport practiced by people living in the Gangetic plains and part of the rigorous training regime of Indian wrestlers. However, since the 1920s, the swinging of the jodi has disappeared from the landscape of modern physical education in the country, and along with it the historical link that existed between the jodi and the baton. This piece of knowledge almost proved to be true when I saw a jodi being used as a doorstop at a local, neighborhood gym in Kolkata in 2016, while investigating the advent of the global culture of fitness in the city. Alter’s (1992, 1993, 1994, 2004a, 2004b) historical ethnography of the lives of pehalwans (wrestlers) of India documents the endogenic, or locally found, intransposable physical culture of people living in northern parts of the country who abided by a “somatic ideology” (Alter 1994) that disciplinary regimens of the body serve as powerful antidotes against the physical decay and social dissoluteness of life. For a sociologist interested in examining how cultural beliefs about fitness are globalizing in contemporary Kolkata, seeing the jodi being used as a doorstop served as a magnified moment during my fieldwork. The moment presented itself to me as I waited to interview Jagdish Singh, a personal trainer in a local gym of the city, and through a window that was left open I got my first glimpse of the jodi set against the door. It made me question: Was a powerful cultural symbol of endogenic fitness discourse of India becoming obsolete and being relegated to the sidelines of history? After all, I was present at that moment to interview a personal fitness trainer who primarily worked in the newly formed American-styled gyms in the city, part of a growing fitness industry that was believed to be the fastest-growing sector in the overall health market in India. In 2012, a newspaper article in The National reported that India’s overall fitness market was estimated to be about US $700 million, with fitness services and products accounting for almost two-thirds of that value. American-styled gyms, such as the US fitness franchise Gold’s Gym, had the explicit goal of internationalizing the experience of working out. These gyms now dominate discourses of fitness in the city of Kolkata, which once enjoyed the reputation of being a bastion of nationalist

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physical institutions such as wrestling, stick-fighting, bodybuilding, and yoga (Basu and Banerjee 2006; Chatterjee 2015; Kar 2013). Since Gold’s opened its first gym in the city of Kolkata in 2005, the city has seen a rapid increase in American-styled gyms and an influx of global capital in the field of fitness. Young entrepreneurs in the city are redirecting capital from their family businesses to invest in gyms or partner with global fitness franchises that provide multiple services (such as swimming pools, organic cafés, on-site nutritionists), giving these gyms the moniker, “multi-gyms.” The more modernized a multi-gym, however, the fewer material references are made to endogenic practices of physical culture, such as the jodi. Going to multi-gyms in contemporary Kolkata has followed the same trajectory of fitness that we saw unfold in western societies (Maguire 2001, 2008). Fit embodiment has to be constantly managed and worked on, which is fulfilled by creating personal services that enable the fit look. When American franchise Gold’s Gym opened its first center in Kolkata, it introduced the US business model of providing services of certified personal fitness trainers (Maguire 2001). Using the services of a personal trainer serves as a status symbol for clients (Hutson 2016) and is viewed as an “investment in health” (Talukdar 2012), since personal trainers get individuals to commit to develop their selves by developing their bodies. The impetus for pursuing a fit-thin body among urban Indians (Talukdar 2012, 2014a) can be attributed to an emerging neoliberal ethos in the country that individuals must consume themselves in body projects that help maximize self-gains and accomplish personal growth. Abiding by the neoliberal ethos of life means using a market-driven rationality that bodies should be transformed into entrepreneurial projects to yield unbounded economic gains (Rose 2007). In contemporary Bengal, multi-­ gyms serve as institutions of embodied neoliberalism that foster “internalized individuality and self-responsibility” (Luna 2019), with the roles of personal trainers, like Jagdish Singh, accentuated as managers and dispensers of new techniques of fitness. Neoliberal values of fitness—that is, to embody a thin-fit look, take personal responsibility to become more productive, employ techniques of physical optimization, seek marketplace solutions to health and fitness issues, and be economically successful—stand in contrast to practices of endogenic physical institutions such as pehalwani (wrestling), or bodybuilding, which focuses on developing superior strength and disciplinary skills in men. Pehalwani, for instance, was not contingent on an outward display of muscularity but on demonstrations of raw physical strength of

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the body. Physical culture was also collectivist in nature. The nationalist bodybuilding culture in the country required über-muscular bodies from its members, but the bodies were always part of communities that fostered collectivist identity. In some cases, these bodily practices morphed into religio-nationalist identities of Masculine Hinduism (Basu and Banerjee 2006). The discourse of global fitness culture, however, has monetized the display of fitness and what it represents. The pursuit of fitness—the fit, muscular look—is a form of embodied consumption that needs to be purchased at the marketplace. Fitness in contemporary Bengal is now about pursuing a thin-fit body, which threatens to occupy a cultural space outside of institutions of deference and apprenticeship characterizing the organizing principles of Bengal’s physical culture for the last two centuries. Globalization theorists may explain this shift, and the loss of cultural significance that wrestlers or bodybuilders enjoyed, as a significant disruption in the way people have come to perceive physical culture, health, and well-being (Bhabha 2004), or as a new form of cultural imperialism (Gupta 2001). In this chapter, however, I take a different route. Based on a socio-­ historical analysis of interviews with twenty personal trainers across eighteen gyms in the city of Kolkata, I found that there are important continuities between the non-monetized, endogenic physical culture of pre-liberalized Bengal and the new contemporary, neoliberal culture of fitness. Personal trainers in the United States act primarily as agents of the fitness marketplace, propagating the belief that consuming fitness products and services in the marketplace is essential to the pursuit of fitness (Maguire 2001, 2008). As frontline workers, their tasks include training their clients and learning to succeed in the consumer markets of fitness by becoming endorsers of fitness-related goods and services. In their ability to teach about fitness, a valued commodity in neoliberal regimes, personal trainers do enjoy some amount of authority over their clients (Hutson 2016), but they are not completely shielded from the subservience linked to the service-­oriented nature of their work (Otis 2012). Personal trainers in Kolkata, similarly, act as agents of a market economy. In addition to exhibiting a commitment to abide by an “ethic of continuous self-­improvement” (Maguire 2001), such as keeping their certifications up-to-date and embodying fitness, they also have to take initiatives to develop a stable client base, attract corporate sponsorships through product endorsements, and find ways to keep their clients motivated to keep their memberships.

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They too are exposed to the neoliberal precarity that comes with service work, such as low wages, job insecurity, or giving into the exigencies of market demands on their bodies and skills, just like their counterparts in the fields of retail, hospitality, or sports in non-western contexts (Inglis 2019; Maitra and Maitra 2018; Otis 2012). But as my fieldwork progressed, the argument that personal trainers were only mediators of a burgeoning fitness economy had to be reassessed. The men had maintained strong connections to the endogenic fitness culture of the city, especially the fostering of traditional embodied ties and sentiments—or what I call “important continuities”—which they nurtured and plugged back into their jobs as personal trainers. For instance, they continued to partake in neighborhood- or state-level bodybuilding competitions that had roots in local, communal, and nationalist cultural events centered on physical activities. Personal trainers had not uprooted themselves from the familiar, local values of the physical culture of the city that fostered fraternal ties based on relationships of apprenticeship, mutual support, and deference. They were actively involved in maintaining “intimate economies of love and support” (Freeman 2014, 208) among themselves. For instance, on the one hand, while working in multi-gyms, they recruited and trained the younger generation of personal trainers and introduced them to the field of bodybuilding. On the other hand, they urged their fellow members in their neighborhood’s gyms to apply for jobs at multi-gyms and seek careers in personal training. Theoretically prioritizing important continuities to understand the link between pre-global fitness culture in Bengal and the neoliberal ethic of fitness requires taking on a historical, “embedded” approach that tends to get effaced from sociological engagements of how cultural worlds interact, especially with regard to cultural worlds of non-western communities. An embedded approach allowed me to question theories that locate the neoliberal market as the ground-zero of fostering the entrepreneurial spirit of self-work in men and women. Such theorizing fails to account for the shared sense of history and rootedness to local contexts that equally stimulated partnerships and collaborative enterprises in personal trainers, which they created with each other and through their bodies. I take a cue from Das (1989) who has argued that using the “paradigm of social action” to explain social behavior is limited in its ability to grasp the lived realities of non-westerners. An embedded, context-driven approach provides a much-needed correction to theories of rational action, a legacy of western social scientists that sees social behavior primarily as a response

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brought upon by drastic changes in the larger socio-economic system and emphasizes on how external structures work through and within individuals. The theory of rational action, modeled after the desires and interests of European men in historically specific moments of rapid economic changes, is not equipped to understand “all other forms of being” (321) and of histories that have not followed the same trajectory as western societies.1 There is no denying the fact that the influx of global capital into the city of Kolkata has created new classifiable experiences, while plunging it into a symbolic struggle over these classification systems (Donner and De Neve 2006; Talukdar 2014a, 2014b). This symbolic struggle in the field of fitness was most visible in the lives of personal trainers who work in multi-­gyms in the city. The main argument of my chapter is that in contemporary Bengal, there are two social forces in play that underlie the overlapping of the new and old modalities of fitness culture: Neoliberalization and cultural persistence. Neoliberalization of fitness has created institutions of dependence, but those very contexts have harbored spaces of autonomy and regeneration, as seen in the revival or renewed excitement surrounding endogenic practices such as bodybuilding. This in itself would be categorized as a paradox, but when viewed through the lives of the personal trainers, I found that the men found ways of saddling both worlds in ways that were not paradoxical to them but were instead a natural progression of their career goals in the fitness world, as “subjects of their own histories” (Das 1989), and with an “authorial voice” (Ray and Radhakrishnan 2010). Linking the worlds, or maintaining continuity, was made possible by the cultural self-work—or what I call cultural entrepreneurship—of the personal trainers in the industry. This kind of self-work entailed embarking on a body project that blends the neoliberal ethos of constant selfwork to succeed economically with the emotional need to preserve familiar institutions and intimate bonds. Before expounding on what I mean by cultural entrepreneurship, I will first critique contemporary sociological theorizing of neoliberal body projects, which fails to 1  For instance, Das argues that both Foucault and Goffman failed to recover the subject in their theories of social behavior. Foucault’s theory of governmentality, or the argument that markets are the new enforcers of docility that teach modern rational individuals how to be regulated and governed as “free subjects” (1989, 118), fails to account for the subject or the individual.

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account for the embodied cultural institutions of non-westerners that equally thrive in this new economy.

Embodied Precariousness, Neoliberal Body Projects, and Ethics of Self-making Neoliberalism is typically defined as a set of economic political practices that propose that human well-being can be best advanced when individuals take responsibility for their economic destinies and perfect the art of well-calculated risk-taking in their entrepreneurial endeavors (Harvey 2005).2 Embodied neoliberalism (Luna 2019) as a concept tries to capture the “representations through which it (or neoliberalism) is put into action” (Hilgers 2013, 85, parenthesis mine). I theorize embodied neoliberalism, however, as a form of self-gaze that links the self and body to market practices such that we become self-driven body projects constantly introspecting and finding creative, innovative means to lead physically robust lives. Any theorizing on embodied neoliberalism mandates accounting for the precarity brought upon by the privatization of life chances, the cornerstone of neoliberal ideology. Market gains, after all, are subject to forces of uncertainty, which not only put a curb on human aspirations for growth that lead to forms of “neoliberal precarity” (Hardt and Negri 2004) but also create circuitous effects on body projects. In the following section, I assess the implications of theorizing the neoliberal body projects of the personal trainers in my study against existing studies that tend to mark body projects of working-class and lower-income individuals living in non-western contexts as necessarily deficient and falling short of realizing their full potential. The onset of a market economy is marked by practices of the self that encourage embellishing the material body to secure economic gains. Embodied neoliberalism in action is perhaps easier to see in the rising importance of the aesthetic economy. The easy movement of global capital has led to an aesthetic economy where “looks” have come to define organizational notions of productivity, hard work, and social worth (Casanova 2015; Warhurst et al. 2009). Fitness, a key requirement of this 2  Richard Cantillon, an economist, introduced “entrepreneur” as a term in the eighteenth century to describe a person who assumes the management of a business. Specifically, entrepreneurs assume the management of risk and business. It was used to distinguish the risk-­ takers from the ordinary business owners (Schumpeter 1934).

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look, has been further institutionalized as a powerful embodiment of the neoliberal ethic of life (Guthman and Dupuis 2006). Among women of Kolkata, for instance, the imperative to turn dieting into body projects of health and productivity for the sake of gaining employment or staying employed found the strongest foothold in women in middle and lower middle-class families (Talukdar 2012, 2014b). The question that lingers, though, is if both neoliberal ideology and its embodied forms yield similar results across the spectrum of social classes (Boeri 2018; Vijayakumar 2020; Radhakrishnan 2018). Neoliberal precarity—the uncertainty and instability of work—disproportionately affects working-class families. However, paradoxically, the worsening of economic insecurities does not diminish but amplifies the material body as the template on which entrepreneurial ambitions can thrive. Women from economically modest backgrounds in Barbados, for instance, embraced their jobs as call-center workers in the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry as the right opportunity to develop a type of “pink-collar, cosmopolitan femininity,” despite documented evidence that call-center work requires long hours, low wages, and unstable social standing (Freeman 2014). One way to explain this preoccupation is that bodies are our most intimate possession and a readily available site of self-work. Chinese women from rural and working-class backgrounds westernize their appearance to find employment in the hospitality industry in the big cities of Beijing and Kunming. But these body projects stay merely aspirational in nature, or what Otis calls “aspirational urbanism” (2012, 8). In spite of changing their clothes and demeanor to appease their international clientele, the competencies of the Chinese women came under speculation for the way they looked. Similarly, a study in Kolkata found that newly formed malls in the city “modulate underclass female service worker bodies to align them with the corporeal ideals of a globally fetishized consumer-­citizenship aesthetics” (Maitra and Maitra 2018, 1). Modulation entailed women redoing their social sense of fashion and dispositions. When it comes to turning the bodily aspirations of working-class individuals or people from rural backgrounds into entrepreneurial imperatives, research indicates that the neoliberal gaze works from a place of deficiency. In the next section I make the case for how re-evaluating theories of embodied neoliberalism will help us (a) overcome the zero-sum approach currently impacting how we understand the bodily cultural projects of non-westerners and (b) address the heuristic inability of existing approaches

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that fail to see that embodied projects of neoliberalism are not premised on a rupture of important continuities between the past and the present.

Intimate Economies, Cultural Entrepreneurship, and Ethics of Self-Making Neoliberalism is often described as a phenomenon entailing a radical break from the past—a moment exceptionally endowed with a novel set of economic and social factors that create liberating experiences for the modern individual. However, neoliberalism, just like modernity or globalization, can become a hollow concept unless it is recognized as a process that considers “the historicity of places and institutions where neoliberalism is deployed and the historicity of dispositions that embody it” (Hilgers 2013, 78). What follows is the tracing and situating of the historicity of dispositions, places, and institutions of Bengal’s physical culture that intersect with market-driven, profit-oriented body projects to give life to the entrepreneurial work of personal trainers in this study. I use the term cultural entrepreneurship to capture the self-work of personal trainers that helps them maintain important continuities between two sets of organizing principles of fitness without prioritizing one over the other. The term helps to capture the historicity of dispositions that equally and powerfully inform the self and do not simply disappear with the onset of a new type of economic logic. It also allows us to question if the widespread privatization of all aspects of life is the sole catalyst for this deep quest of self-making. Freeman contends that entrepreneurialism is not simply an economic style of business but also a way of being and feeling in the world. At the center of the entrepreneurial self are blurred boundaries between the self as an enterprising unit and the self as part of “intimate economies of love and support,” (2014, 208) which the individual invariably dips into to become motivated and inspired into action. She found proof of this in her study of women working in call-centers in Barbados. As their economy neoliberalized, women called upon kinship ties, matrifocality, and other Caribbean cultural tropes to embark on their entrepreneurial endeavors. Similarly, the personal trainers in my study embarked upon embodied self-­ projects that would yield economic returns in exchange for their fitness expertise, while simultaneously helping to cultivate familiar relations of their endogenic physical practices. Cultural entrepreneurship is the

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self-work that personal trainers embark upon as they navigate, maneuver, and blend two cultural principles of fitness in their pursuit of fitness. Joseph Alter’s study of pehalwani is a comprehensive study of the intimate economy of learning that defines endogenic physical cultural institutions of South Asia. Physical institutions of India are premised on a somatic ideology, comprising of cognitive, emotional, and sensory dimensions, which claims that physical exertion is a powerful means to ward off the degeneracy that social and ecological structures impose on the body (Alter 1994, 575). This somatic ideology is maintained through intimate social economies of learning, most of which were non-monetized. For instance, the pehalwan always draws his inspiration from a network of embodied social and emotional ties. His first and foremost identity is that of a student, whose individual quest of achieving bodily excellence begins when he is initiated into a community of like-minded individuals and forges a relationship with a mentor or guru. A guru is a human endowed with limitless knowledge and mystic contemplation, who “draws on his (or her) spiritual strength to bring disciples closer” (Alter 1992, 68) to ideals of self-learning. Mentor and student both show an abandonment of the self for the greater process of learning. Thus, consumerist systems and bureaucratic structures are met with skepticism due to their inability to limit elements of human greed, complacency, or willful desires—all of which the wrestler tries to reign in to attain physical and spiritual awakening. Many centuries of colonial rule in the Indian subcontinent have further strengthened intimate social economies of learning and bonding in physical institutions. By the end of the nineteenth century, indigenous sports were folded into nationalist sports to counter the colonial machinery’s campaigns to emasculate the men of the nation, especially the Bengali man (Topdar 2017). In the first assembly of Hindu mela in 1867, wrestlers were invited to raise awareness or consciousness about physical exercise among fellow Indians, and by 1875 Gobor Guha had established the first gymnasium in Kolkata with wrestling and bodybuilding exercises as specialties. In colonial Bengal, inducting physical culture into the “curriculum of incipient nationalism” found ready acceptance (Chatterjee 2015, 418). Post-independence, youth health clubs and neighborhood associations became the new sites for physical activities that kept relations of support and deference central to the pursuit of learning about fitness. Kolkata houses hundreds of neighborhood associations, which serve key community events such as hosting important religious and cultural festivals. Some,

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however, have stuck to their original intent of being sports and physical activity centers. Personal trainers in the study were all linked to these neighborhood associations because of their initial attraction of wanting to lift weights with male members of their community. It was a sense of belongingness to neighborhood associations—a place where you learn together—that constituted the “historicity of dispositions” in the lives of the personal trainers and a way of functioning for them. A sociological analysis that uses the neoliberal market as the starting point to understand the social ambitions of personal trainers can easily eclipse the intimate social economies of learning that foreground the lives of these trainers. In this chapter, I document how in spite of their professional status as personal trainers, the men fell back on their original habitus, which existed before the neoliberal ethos of fitness came calling, to explain their love for fitness. These cultural sentiments and beliefs went on to act as catalysts for preserving and strengthening relationships of “deference and care” among themselves.

Methods My arguments on cultural entrepreneurship are based on a narrative analysis of interviews with twenty personal trainers in the city of Kolkata who worked in multi-gyms in the city. The men in the study were 19–47 years of age, and I approached them at their place of work at multi-gyms. I started with a snowball method of recruiting, but as the interviews progressed, I realized that the men had invariably started their journey in fitness and bodybuilding at their neighborhood gyms before seeking employment in multi-gyms. In fact, some of them invited me to their local gyms to do the interviews. This is when I decided to break from the snowball method and started going directly to local neighborhood gyms to see if the men would be willing to be part of my study. My sample thus is mostly made up of professionally employed personal trainers, though two of them at the time of the study were considering employment in multi-­ gyms. The questions I used to understand entrepreneurial ambitions in the men were divided into three categories: (a) habitus of learning, (b) seeing fit embodiment as a form of investment, and (c) the differences they saw between “neighborhood gyms” and “multi-gyms.” By the end of the eight-month period of being in the field, I had visited and taken detailed notes in eighteen gyms in the city every time I visited them. The notes encompass all that I observed during the interviews. Out

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of the eighteen gyms, fifteen were multi-gyms and had been around for no more than ten years, while three gyms were neighborhood youth clubs that had been around for more than fifty years. The project to understand how neoliberalization is changing the fabric of physical culture in the city of Kolkata started for me more than a decade back, when I went to interview a group of women at a “gym” during the course of collecting data on why women feel the need to lose weight. During that time in 2005 a “gym” still enjoyed an endogenic, open-ended connotation. It was a term loosely used to describe any arrangement, whether it was the neighborhood youth association or a few rooms in the residence of the local health professional that was dedicated to physical exercises with the aid of some machines. These neighborhood associations were formally registered as youth club associations, but in local parlance they are referred to either as clubs or as neighborhood’s gyms. For the rest of the chapter, I will refer to them as neighborhood gyms. By the year 2016, when I went back to study the physical culture of the city, I was not prepared to see the extent to which “multi-gyms” had spread in the city. I entered the field with some amount of ambivalence toward physical fitness, as my interest has waxed and waned during my life. My first encounter with a gym was when, as a college-aged young woman, I started enjoying my first taste of personal freedoms such as traveling independently around the city. Going to the gym unchaperoned was one such freedom. The gym was located at our neighborhood youth association, which dedicated a section of the building to sports enthusiasts. My gym teacher was a young woman, a track-runner who was competing at the state level, who often led class by doing “free-hand” exercises. My visits to the gym, however, were cut short when I ended up with a back-injury that incapacitated me from going back. It was only as a graduate student in the United States that I fell in love with the idea of working out at the gym. At my university gym, I joined scores of nameless people on treadmills and elliptical machines in large, anonymous spaces in the single-minded pursuit of working out. As a result of this history, my interactions at multi-gyms in Kolkata were more comfortable than those at neighborhood gyms when I went back to research them. I found it relatively easy to access multi-gyms, as I was aware of the setting and the pace of multi-gyms in the city of Kolkata. My status as an English-speaking college professor further helped me secure some of my early interviews. But my interest in neighborhood gyms was met with suspicion or a general awkwardness. Neighborhood gyms were

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open to male members all through the day with some designated hours for women. When I visited them, I was asked to come back during women’s hours. In the rare cases that I had full access to a neighborhood gym was when the head trainer, always a man, gave me his approval. My contact with multi-gyms at times made me even more suspect at neighborhood gyms. The one encounter that stood out was when I had a difficult time getting a hold of administrators of a reputed neighborhood gym in the city and had to go back multiple times. On one such visit, the guard of the gym started questioning me suspiciously about what I really did for a living and if I worked at a new multi-gym that had opened recently down the street. Initially I was very surprised at the question, only to realize that the guard had followed me during one of my previous visits and saw me walk into the new multi-gym nearby. The guard had assumed that I was an employee of the multi-gym and had used the ruse of a college professor to access entry into their gym. This was the first insight I had of the underlying tensions between these two sets of institutions, which became more potent as I analyzed the interviews. The men in my study, the personal trainers, were also aware of these tensions but, as I elaborate below, they also wanted to create a bridge between the two institutions.

Findings In order to make my arguments about how the advent of multi-gyms has resulted in both the development of entrepreneurial ambitions in men who worked as personal trainers and a strengthened will to maintain and expand their cultural associations, which promoted bodybuilding, I have divided my findings into three distinct sections: (a) the two fields of fitness that have emerged in contemporary Kolkata and the underlying tension between them, (b) the strengthening of market-driven entrepreneurial behavior, and (c) the channeling of love for endogenic fitness practices in reviving institutions of bodybuilding. Two Fields of Fitness Sociologists studying fitness typically identify it as a cultural field of relatively structured positions within which individuals, institutions, producers, and consumers compete to define fitness. This is evident in the fact that fitness centers compete among themselves to provide a legitimate experience of fitness for their prospective clients. Wrapped up in this

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contestation over what constitutes fitness is a struggle over status and recognition. In the US, membership in elite fitness clubs is an indispensable element of the lifestyle of status-conscious individuals. In contemporary Bengal, this hierarchy plays out in the form of neighborhood gyms versus multi-gyms, leading to the formation of two fields of fitness. For the owners of multi-gyms, going to a multi-gym means ensuring that the clients stay connected to a global society, even when physically grounded in their city. The experience is meant to be transposable and relatable with experiences of like-minded individuals in other parts of the world. Gold’s Gym, for instance, includes in their membership a free “Travel Card” whereby one could use their Kolkata membership across the globe. This gave Gold’s an advantage over others because it was able to create a global experience for its clientele that no other multi-gym in the city could possibly offer. Other facilities include high-tech machines, high-­ definition televisions that screen popular TV channels, iPod connectivity, aerobic studios, and mirrored walls for their clients. Multi-gyms claimed that they offer higher-standard services because of their ability to hire “internationally certified” personal trainers. There were also various levels of personal training with separate fees that clients could buy, namely basic, intermediate, and premium. I was told that the difference in these levels was the extent to which personal trainers would engage with the clients. The success of a personal trainer depended on maintaining a client base and rising up the ranks meant adding certifications to their resume and years of work to their experience. The multi-gyms had names such as “Skulpt,” “Kick,” “Krunch,” “Fitness Factory,” or “Amplified Fitness Center,” which implied that individuals would be trained to manufacture physical strength. They were also in English. In contrast, neighborhood gyms are extensions of neighborhood clubs or associations that make up the social fabric of the city, as discussed in previous sections of the chapter. In recent times, the associations have come to enjoy a loose patronage among families living in the area, and they enjoy a physical presence, even if housed in dilapidated old buildings in the neighborhood. More importantly, these associations continue to be places where men exercise together, share learning tips, and take turns to use the machines. The collectivist logic underlying these physical health clubs is represented in the use of names such as the “Kalyan Sangha Avijatri Club” or as “Behala Kalyan Sangha” (kalyan means good and sangha means assembly).

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In a lot of ways, these neighborhood gyms are like the boxing gym that Wacquant studied in the south side of Chicago. Wacquant described the boxing gyms as a sanctuary that offers “a cosseted space, close and reserved, where one can, among like-minded others, shelter oneself” (2006, 14). When describing an akhara, or wrestling pit, Alter (1993, 52) writes that akhara is a “world unto itself: insulated, self-contained, and special.” Unlike multi-gyms that were open to all who can purchase a membership, neighborhood gyms had the essence of an akhara. They were open to those who were marked as an insider or part of the community. Hence, when accessing neighborhood associations, I was often given a negative response, and being a researcher was not enough to witness this collective logic in action. One had to validate their presence to feel welcomed in neighborhood gyms or demonstrate a “belief in the game that is born and persists only in and through the group that it defines in turn through a circular process” (Wacquant 2006, 17). In neighborhood gyms, knowledge of fitness had to be collectively learned. “Everybody was a trainer,” said Barun (twenty-six years), which was a common refrain that was repeated by almost all the personal trainers, often with a smile on their face. The smile seemed to be a knowing acknowledgment and a pleasant memory of how things were different in neighborhood gyms when compared to their current place of work. The neoliberalization of fitness in contemporary Bengal has resulted in the migration of middle-class families from neighborhood gyms that were seen as an assembly of men dedicated to common good to multi-gyms that now expedite the process of becoming fit with the aid of modern, technological equipment. This loss of patronage has reduced the status of the neighborhood gym to a poor man’s gym. Personal trainers, themselves, especially the younger men in my study, reiterated that there was a “social class” difference between neighborhood and multi-gyms. Sourav (25) told me that he wanted to break out of his identity as a small-town man (he lived in a suburb of the city) and to “make a name” and “be recognized.” Moving up the social hierarchy of gyms, he went from training at his neighborhood gym, which he referred to as “Arjun Da’s” gym (Da here means brother), to finding employment at his current gym Kick. In spite of his two-hour commute to his workplace, and a salary of $400 per month at his current place of work, Sourav was happy about his current status since his salary doubled and that he was working in a gym in the heart of the city. Staying at his former gym would mean losing out on a steady source of income and stagnation.

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Similarly, Barun (26) started his career in bodybuilding at his local neighborhood gym, Kalyan Sangha. Once he decided to build a career in fitness, he gradually moved away from bodybuilding and sought employment as a personal trainer in multi-gyms in the city. He, like Sourav, described his employment at Gold’s Gym as “progress” that he had made in his life. However, Barun described the “environment” at his neighborhood gym as a “low level experience” that did not match the “high culture” of a multi-gym. In contrast, Jagdish Singh (47), a veteran in the field of fitness whom I introduced in the beginning of the chapter, worked at multi-gyms during the day and spent his evening training young men at two neighborhood gyms in the city. He described the neighborhood gyms as “welfare societies.” When I asked him why he trained these men, he replied by saying, “What if there were no neighborhood gyms? Where will the poor go? Membership in multi-gyms costs around 2400 rupees (or $200) a month. The poor cannot afford it. Can you find a gym now for 90 rupees (or $2) a month?” Though fully aware of the social distance between the gyms, the men identified neighborhood gyms as places where “real” fitness happened. Ram (42), who had just returned from Dubai after working as a personal trainer in one of the city’s elite hotels, made fun of the experience of working out in cold, air-conditioned rooms. He said that as kids he and his friends used to call them “lady’s gyms.” He also went on to say that “multi-­gyms are not real gyms. Those are air-conditioned gyms. That is not how you learn.” According to Ram, working out required “sweating” and “feeling the heat,” which air-conditioned multi-gyms could not provide. Most of the personal trainers were critical of the function of multigyms in society. For instance, Shankar (32) had this to say, My background is in the field of byam (exercise), and my knowledge is what I have learnt while sweating on the ground. From there, slowly I have got to this point. I was a college dropout, but now I am a Cross Fit trainer. Over the years I have got myself certified. The fact that there is so much to get out of this profession now is mind-blowing. (Shankar, 37, parenthesis mine)

“Sweating” or “sweating on the ground” is a reference to endogenic aspects of wrestling, bodybuilding, or even doing byam (yoga or a routinized physical exercise). The ideology of wrestling, for instance, requires that the physical body gets in touch with a particular matrix of natural elements of air, earth, water, and trees so that they can all come together

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to orient the body properly to the world (Alter 1993). Hence, akhara is an open, outdoor space that is always found under the shade of trees. Ram and Shankar as personal trainers were conversant with new technologies of optimization (such as TRX suspension traps), but they were not willing to unlearn that the potency of fitness regimens came from an earthy engagement and physical connectedness to one’s ecological environment. Neighborhood gyms were also recruiting grounds for personal trainers currently employed in multi-gyms to channel young talent into the profession of personal training, while creating a distinctive identity of what it means to be a personal trainer in the Bengali fitness culture. The path to creating this identity, however, required a stop at one of the city’s many multi-gyms where the men and women experienced the global culture of fitness. Self-Making in Fitness Consumer Markets The argument that neoliberalism ushers in the monetization of physical culture and creates consumer markets around fitness can be further witnessed in the emergence of the occupation of personal trainers in the field of fitness. The boom that the fitness industry experienced in the western world in the 1970s was a result of the expansion of the ideal that the marketplace held solutions for challenges individuals faced in modern times, and that, through consumerism, individuals could meet those challenges and lead robust, engaged lives. Fitness became more about maintaining an image than about actual health. Personal trainers emerged as the supervisor of that image, promoting various projects and services that enhance a “customer’s identity projects” (Maguire 2001, 288). Personal training as a field in India followed a similar trajectory and co-emerged with multi-­ gyms in the city. Additionally, because of low wages and a lack of benefits, the field is flooded with men and women whose class backgrounds are glaringly different from the clients they serve. These men and women lacked the educational qualifications, English proficiency, and other forms of embodied capitals that signify that they belong to the affluent social class. Personal trainers in India are hence caught up first in building their own identity projects to embody a form of aspirational urbanism (Otis 2012) that is laced with entrepreneurial ambitions. Now, becoming personal trainers in multi-gyms means passing multiple standardized tests and getting certificates, which stands in sharp contrast to the culture of apprenticeship and building the mentor-disciple

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relationship that pervades learning experiences in physical cultural institutions. Owners of gyms required their personal trainers to be certified from American fitness enterprises such as the American Council on Exercise (ACE) and International Sports Science Association (ISSA). These organizations condensed training into three- to four-day-long workshops led by American fitness specialists, which culminated in the granting of certificates. Men and women interested in the field of personal training were required to become certified only through these organizations and continuously update their certificates based on changes in fitness techniques in the United States. During interviews, it was common for the men to provide me with a list of certifications they had acquired in their short careers as personal trainers. Some were procured online and in English, which most of the men found difficult to navigate. There were some senior personal trainers who found ways to keep postponing certification while they continued working for multi-gyms. Others embraced these opportunities and believed that it made them more marketable if they got the opportunity to seek employment outside the country. The process of certification had seemingly opened up a world of opportunities for the men and women in the field, a distinguishing feature of neoliberal entrepreneurialism. Some even believed that certifications added precision to what they already knew about muscles and the human body and made the “science” behind muscle building such as flexibility, balance, or cardiovascular endurance easier to understand. Ritesh (40), for instance, had just finished certification in foot anatomy that taught him the science and technique of working out barefoot. This certification was in a list of certificates (TRX suspension training being the other one), which gave him an edge over other personal trainers in the field and doubled his impact on his clients. Accumulating certificates, or investing in optimal techniques, granted personal trainers the necessary status on the gym floor that proved crucial in filling up the status gap they have with their clients, who belonged to elite families. These were clear-cut cases of “market-embodied labor” (Otis 2012, 9), that is, giving into the expectations of clients who require personal trainers to stay up-to-date with modern technologies. The men were very clear about the fact that they were selling a desirable commodity, and in some cases did not hesitate in commodifying themselves. For instance, I was a little surprised to hear Raghav (32) proudly and in a matter-of-fact tone tell me that he was “the most expensive of them all” (personal trainers) in his gym. Raghav, in addition to personal training,

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managed other personal trainers in his gym. The expertise he could offer to his clients and his distinguished status as head trainer was indeed a matter of pride for Raghav. He also took pride in the higher price tag attached to his expertise and the fact that he was a sought-after product. Certifications acted as a leveler for some of the deficiencies the men felt they had when it came to embodying easy cues of urbanism, such as the ability to converse easily in English or styling their look with trendy haircuts and clothes to level the status gap between themselves and their clients. The ability to speak fluent English seemed to be the biggest cultural gap that persisted between personal trainers and their clients. Gym owners, on learning that I work for an American university, would warn me about the lack of English-speaking ability among personal trainers and offer to act as translators during interviews. The social class gap was also apparent in the salary structure of personal trainers in multi-gyms and the localities in which they lived. In spite of working for close to seventy-two hours in a week spread over six days in a week, the men and women did not make more than 400 dollars in a month, which is much below the income range of the affluent classes (Talukdar and Linders 2013). This also meant that they could not move closer to their place of work, since multi-gyms were located in affluent pockets of the city. The men had to at least commute two to three hours every day to just get to work. For the younger personal trainers, though, the field was a way to combine their passion for fitness and need for income while being catapulted into the cultural worlds of elites and the affluent. Being hired to work in American-styled gyms and having clients who were television or film celebrities or CEOs and industrialists was seen as a sign of “having a foot in the door” in a social space that held the promise of changing their class background. A parameter of success widely used by the men was their ability to attract corporate sponsorship, which would require the men to wear logos of the endorsed product on their shirts or caps in exchange of a commission on merchandise sales. Often, these companies would target personal trainers to become their ambassadors and promote these items because of their proximity to fitness enthusiasts in the form of clients. The products ranged from nutritional or energy drinks to portable gadgets that use electronic muscle stimulation to help with weight loss. The men often used “scientific arguments to make a case for why individuals should use these products, though they took more pride in the fact that they were able to sell a product independently, of their own accord, and as personal trainers. These ventures were business deals and also a form of

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self-investment that would attract more sponsors and establish their status as entrepreneurs. The clearest sign of entrepreneurial ambitions among personal trainers was the desire to start their own gyms. Shankar, who characterized himself as a veteran in the field of fitness in the city, had to rethink his career as multi-gyms swept the city. It meant taking a hiatus for a year or two to go to Mumbai and learn about functional training or Cross Fit training. He had first heard about functional training from a client and knew he had to learn about it to mark himself differently than his competitors or other personal trainers in the field. During our interview, Shankar made sure that I realized that while he worked as a Cross Fit trainer, he was also the owner of a gym named Viva Fitness Zone in one of the suburbs of Kolkata where he lived. As multi-gyms flourished in the city, Shankar realized that he could create a demand for a gym in suburbs outside the city. Most of the personal trainers, both veterans and beginners, shared with me that their ultimate ambition was to start a gym of their own and introduce something new in their community. Building Communities in Fitness Consumer Markets The other striking facet of personal trainers in my study was a strong desire to hold onto the social and cultural processes of their local communities that initiated them into the world of fitness. More than half of the male personal trainers in the study had a “backstory” before they started their careers in multi-gyms. Very few could talk about their journey in the fitness field without mentioning mentors, parents, or guardians who inspired them to enter this field. Their fitness careers started in neighborhood gyms, where they had learned the basics of bodybuilding and competed in district- and state-level championships. Since the scope of bodybuilders in India is very limited, which reflects the overall state of sports and athletics in the country, the men struggled for recognition as bodybuilders. The opening of American-styled gyms, in spite of the meager pay, became important income opportunities. At their new places of work, the men as personal trainers enjoyed a semi-autonomous status. In spite of forming direct relationships with clients, and being physically present for long hours, they were kept out of decisions such as how the clientele was going to be divided between them or their hours of work. There was also some underlying tension over the ownership and transmission of knowledge, such as which techniques to use on clients. One aspect of their lives that

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remained relatively untouched was the relationships that the personal trainers developed with each other. These personal relationships quickly became a parallel site within multi-gyms in which the men could revitalize fraternal ties by recruiting other personal trainers to become bodybuilders. Samir Ghosh (48) was one of the personal trainers heavily invested in giving Bengal bodybuilding its due recognition in society. Samir won the Mr. Universe title in Bodybuilding in 2008, a rare feat. During the time of my study, he worked as a consultant in one of the multi-gyms in the city and emerged as a harsh critic of the way that the endogenic culture of fitness was being erased from the city. Though it became clear that he was heavily dependent on the multi-gyms in the city for staying employed and revered for his accomplishments as a bodybuilder, he openly mocked the certification requirements of multi-gyms to be a personal trainer by saying, “Bodybuilding does not need American certification.” The birth of multi-­ gyms in the city, according to Samir and some other personal trainers, was a result of excess wealth in the hands of rich families who have transformed fitness into a “money game.” According to Samir, there were only three or four muscle movements that a bodybuilder needed to know to train for competition or build muscles. He owed that knowledge to his mentor, whom he encountered at the College of Physical Education that was started by Bengal’s famous bodybuilder and practitioner of yoga, Bishnu Charan Ghosh. Skeptical of the modern world of fitness, Samir routinely recruited young personal trainers to compete at state- and national-level bodybuilding championships. Sourav (25), who I introduced earlier in the chapter, crossed paths with Samir at a multi-gym and instantaneously developed a mentor-disciple relationship. Samir recruited Sourav to become a bodybuilder and trained him for free for an hour every day. This meant that Sourav used his lunch break in the middle of his twelve-hour shift to train in bodybuilding. This involved traveling to another part of the city that added to his commute time. Sourav was also fully aware that the field of bodybuilding did not yield much monetary benefit. The prize money at state-level championships was very meager. But the discipline of training with his mentor is what Sourav believed he needed to make a name for himself in the field. Dibakar (32), another student of Samir, showed similar deference toward Samir. For Dibakar, working as a personal trainer in a multi-gym was subservient to his dedication to the field of bodybuilding and the goal of training and motivating other men to pursue bodybuilding. This was a

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reiteration of what they had learned at neighborhood gyms—that knowledge of fitness needed to be collectively learned and maintained by emotional ties. Almost all the personal trainers in the field mentioned a “mentor” or “guru,” a special teacher or coach who inspired them to join the field of fitness. Neighborhood gyms continued to hold their appeal for the male personal trainers, as this was the place where they first learned the basics of muscle training, even if there was “no money” involved. They often described this attachment as an “emotional pull” they felt for these places and their mentors. Thus, Jagdish (47) felt an obligation to train young men who were interested in fitness, even after working two shifts in two different multi-gyms in the city. During my visit to the neighborhood gym that Jagdish went to a couple of times a week, I found him surrounded by eight to ten men huddled in a small room taking turns to bench press and lift and pull weights on basic machines spread across the floor. Jagdish told me it was “his” gym, by which he did not mean ownership (since the place is a registered association) but a place that he called his own. Mentoring the young men was a type of non-monetized investment for Jagdish, since they did not yield any immediate economic benefit, let alone endless returns. The returns that were guaranteed were purely cultural—an assurance that the next generation of personal trainers would maintain the legacy of endogenic practices. The veteran personal trainers strongly felt that the time was right to bring in “new blood” to the game and to find corporate sponsors in the field of bodybuilding. Shankar, for instance, took it upon himself to get back into bodybuilding competitions to encourage his younger employees to do the same. Interestingly, it was the older personal trainers who made an effort to travel and compete with the younger generation in bodybuilding competitions, even though their status as good personal trainers was secure. Some of them chalked up their continued interest in the field of bodybuilding to a love for the game or what they had learned in  local neighborhood gyms. When I asked Ritesh, who was one of the senior trainers at the most coveted Gold’s Gym in the city, why he invested all this money and time to take part in bodybuilding competitions when the prize money was less than $100, he replied by saying, “it is hard to explain—it is a place of love.” The men were fully aware that their struggle to give the culture of Bengal bodybuilding its due status and recognition in national and international circuits was not imminent. But they confronted the lack of control and insecurity by creating social ties that not only celebrated

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community and partnership between the men but also carried forward the culture of deference and care that characterized the learning experiences of the past. Interestingly, the advent of multi-gyms had given new life to fraternal bonds of learning and apprenticeship that would protect that legacy.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have explored the important continuities that exist between endogenic and neoliberal institutions of fitness. The advent of a global discourse of fitness in Kolkata has unleashed a new economic logic that threatens to transform fitness into a market behavior, as seen in the sudden rise of hiring fitness trainers in multi-gyms of the city. This chapter interrupts that narrative to show that the onset of a new economy of fitness has not resulted in the familiar, or endogenic, practices of fitness dissipating into the global or facing an imminent decline. In the face of the rising neoliberalization of the culture of fitness, there has been a renewed interest and revitalization of old modalities of fitness. The main argument of my chapter is that the links and connections between these two worlds, though tenuous, are possible because of the cultural entrepreneurial work of the men of the city who work as personal trainers. Crisscrossing through the city, moving from neighborhood gyms to multi-gyms, the men chalked out paths to build careers in fitness. That path included embedding themselves in the new consumer market of fitness by preoccupying themselves in self-work that required building and asserting their physical and social worth in society. However, they were able to avoid forgoing their embodied knowledge of fitness, which they had learned by maintaining emotional ties with their mentors and community members. Personal trainers showed clear signs of working on body projects such as getting certified, building motivational relationships with clients, attracting product endorsement, and starting new businesses, all in an effort to ensure economic and social gains. This is not to suggest that they necessarily narrowed the status gap that existed between them and their clients, as the men still worked for gym owners and had to put in long hours of work for modest economic returns—similar to the experiences of men and women doing service work in other venues of neoliberal India. However, the men did not lock themselves into the role of personal trainers, nor did they feel fully controlled by market dictates on their skills. Instead, they actively nurtured traditional embodied ties and sentiments

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that initiated their interest in the field of fitness. The older personal trainers were committed to building an academy of fitness enthusiasts, personal trainers, and bodybuilders. What stood out was a continued adherence to a belief that teaching, here about fitness and building muscles, was more than a commercial exchange. The veteran personal trainers in the field saw value in creating affect and nurturing young men, whom they encountered in their neighborhood gyms or multi-gyms, to keep alive physical cultural institutions of pre-neoliberal India. Neoliberalism as a set of cultural dispositions is always open to contestation, conflict, and negotiations, which can significantly alter its power of commodifying all experiences. This chapter questions ongoing debates surrounding neoliberalization when global capital makes inroads into local cultures. The theoretical tendency is to overlook the intimate cultural institutions and community ties of non-westerners that sustain livelihoods and ignite self-making on a regular basis. This chapter also helps create a new niche in the field of cultural studies of fitness, where the focus is on relationships of continuity and symbiosis between bodily cultures. The chapter provides a strong critique of the reliance on individual achievement when employing a neoliberal interpretation of fitness that does not account for the embodied bonds that maintain the culture of fitness.

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Index1

A Addis Ababa, 177, 179, 181, 185, 186, 188, 199n8 Additive logic, 7 Afro-Asian solidarity, 177–201 Ahmedabad, 186, 190, 192, 196 Aishanie, 184–186, 188–191, 193–196, 197n7, 198–200 Akhara, 365, 367 Ambedkar, B.R., 15, 26 American imperialism, 23 Ampaṭṭar, 240, 245, 251 Ancestral property rights, 77 Anshabanda, 68–70, 74–81, 83, 85, 87, 88 Anti-Asian, 214 Anti-Sikh violence of 1984, 207 Anti-sodomy law, 121, 124, 128, 130–136 Aṭimai, 244–246, 245n13

B Bailey, F.G., 16 Baviskar, Amita, 10 Bazaar, 323–348 Belonging, 220, 221, 228 Bhambra, G., 1–3, 22 Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS), 93–96, 93n1, 98–100, 102–116, 107n5, 108n6, 115n7 Bishoftu, 177, 184–186, 188, 191, 192, 195, 198, 199, 199n8 Black feminist, 9, 21, 26 Black liberation, 21, 27 Body, 207, 209, 213, 217–220, 222, 224, 225, 228 Bodybuilding, 352–374 Brahmin, 178, 190 Brahminical patriarchy, 15 British, 209, 212, 215 British Empire, 5 Brokerage, 37, 39, 41, 42, 49, 54, 60–63

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Radhakrishnan, G. Vijayakumar (eds.), Sociology of South Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97030-7

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378 

INDEX

C Capital, 37–63 cultural, 41, 46, 49, 52, 60, 61 economic, 41, 60, 61 social, 41, 46, 49, 52, 60, 61 symbolic, 41, 49, 60, 61 Carnegie Foundation, 5 Caste, 178, 183, 195, 261, 294, 295n1, 296–299, 301–305, 305n4, 307–309, 311, 313–315, 319 Class politics, 93–116 Cold War, 4, 19, 24 Collective body, 207, 214, 216–219, 221, 225, 227, 228 Colonialism, 3, 12, 23 Commodity chains, 12 Communalism, 211 Communism, 5, 16, 25 Community, 205–209, 211–213, 215–222, 216n9, 221n12, 222n13, 224–228 Connected sociology, 22 Contributions to Indian Sociology, 16, 18 Cultural imperialism, 354

Didi, 47, 52–54 Discrimination, 205, 206, 210, 211, 214, 222, 222n13, 225 Domesticity, 275, 279, 282, 286, 287 Domestic violence, 39, 40, 42–44, 42n1, 42n2, 50, 51, 55, 57–59, 61 Double movement, 72 DuBois, 22, 27 Dumont, Louis, 16

D Dada, 47 Dalit feminist, 9, 21 Dalit movements, 21 Dalits, 294–319, 295n1, 299n3, 305n4, 306n5 Dalit scholars, 19 Decolonization, 12, 13, 18, 19, 27 Degrees of freedom, 67–88 Department store, 268, 273n1, 274, 280, 285, 287 Development, 179–182, 184, 189, 190, 196, 200

F Faith, 206–210, 213, 214, 217, 218, 221, 222, 225–227 Fields of fitness, 363–367 Fit embodiment, 353, 361 Fitness, 352–357, 359–374 Five Ks, 209, 217 Ford Foundation, 5, 16 Frank, Andre Gunder, 12 Fraternalism, 196 Fulbright-Hays Act, 5 Fun, 269, 272, 275, 279–282, 285, 287–289

E Embodied identity, 205–228 Embodied neoliberalism, 353, 357, 358 Endogenic, 352–356, 359, 360, 362, 363, 366, 371–373 Entrepreneurship, 352–374 Essentialize, 224 Ethiopia, 177–201 Ethnography, 45, 46, 153–174 European colonialism, 178 Exclusion, 205, 206, 213–214 Extraction, 179, 180

 INDEX 

G Gandhi, Mahatma, 182, 190–192, 200 Garment, 177–179, 182, 184, 187–189, 192–194, 196, 197 Gender, 38, 41, 43, 45, 50, 51, 57, 60–62 Gender-based violence, 38, 40, 42–43, 47, 50 Generation, 219, 224, 225 Ghadar, 214, 216 Global capital, 353, 356, 357, 374 Global capitalism, 180, 181, 184, 200 Global Market, 179, 181, 187–188, 199–201 Global South, 7, 12, 18, 179 Go, J., 1, 3 Golden Temple, 215, 216, 219, 220 Goswami, Manu, 11, 12 Grewal, Inderpal, 13, 13n3 Gurdwara, 216, 217, 220 Guru Nanak, 209 H Habitus, 361 Hair, 205–228 Hegemonic intellectual formations, 6 Hegemony, 93–116 Hindu, 210–217, 220–223, 221n12 Hinduism, 11, 94, 96–98, 104–105, 127, 144, 209, 212–213, 296, 343, 354 Hindu nationalism, 127, 127n2, 128, 147 Honor, 209, 219, 220 Hooks, bell, 2 I ILO conventions, 192 Immigrants, 205, 208, 211, 214, 217, 218

379

India, dominance of, 6 Indian Council for Social Science Research, 17 Indian Ocean networks, 178 Indian sociology, 9, 10, 15, 16, 18–20 Indian state, 208, 213, 215–217, 220, 221, 228 Individual, 207, 210, 213, 216–219, 224, 225, 227, 228 Informal economy, 326–327 Informal workers, 106–107, 115 Interdependence, 154, 155, 158–161 Interviews, 38, 44–46 Islam, 324–330, 332–348 Islamic revival, 346 Islamist, 323, 328, 329, 333, 338, 342, 346–348 J Jaffna, 235–261 K Kaplan, Caren, 13 Karachi, 155, 159, 159n2, 160, 163n5, 164, 165, 267–289 Karaiyār, 241, 242, 245 Kes, 206, 208, 218, 219, 225 Khalsa, 209, 209n4, 210, 212, 219, 224 Kim-Puri, H.J., 13 Kuṭimai, 244, 245, 245n13 L Labor, 94–96, 98–100, 103–109, 111, 114, 115 labor union, 93, 93n1, 98, 102, 104, 106, 107, 109, 112 organized labor, 94, 99, 100

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INDEX

Lahore, 324, 325, 330, 333, 336, 337, 340, 344 Land markets, 67–88 Land reform, 298, 299, 304, 315 Land rights, 68, 73–75, 86 Law, 38, 39, 41–44, 42n1, 42n2, 46–54, 60, 61 Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), 238, 245, 247–253, 260, 261 M Mahila samiti, 37, 43–45, 47, 49 Maoism, 17 Market, 329–332, 330n5 Marketplace, 324–328, 330, 331, 333–342, 345–347 Martial race, 212 Marxist traditions, 12 Minority, 205–207, 211, 221, 226, 227 Modernity, 121–124, 126, 131, 133–136, 139, 144, 146, 147 Mosque, 325, 327, 329–331, 334–338, 342, 343, 347 Mukerji, D.P., 15 Muslim, 205, 211, 212, 213n7, 214, 215, 222–224, 226, 227 N Naḷavar, 240, 244–247, 250 Nationalism, 3, 7, 10, 17, 24 National Legal Services Authority (NALSA), 122, 128–130, 139–142, 142n19, 145 Neocolonialism, 179–184 Neoliberal capital, 181 Neoliberal precarity, 355, 357, 358 Nepali sociology, 17, 19

9/11 terrorist attacks, 26, 210, 222–227 Norms, 39, 40, 45, 51 North America, 2, 6, 8, 18 North American, 1, 2, 9, 21, 22 P Pakistan, 267–289, 323–330, 336, 340, 342, 346, 347 Paḷḷar, 240, 244–247, 250, 254–256, 258, 259 Pañcamar, 240–242, 244, 246n19, 247, 250, 251, 256, 258–260 Panchayat, 47, 48, 52, 59 Panini, M.N., 15, 16 Paṟaiyar, 240, 245, 250 Parsons, Talcott, 11 Partition, 215 Parvathamma, C., 20 Patel, Sujata, 10, 15 Paternalism, 184 Personal trainers, 352–357, 359–361, 363–374 Pleasure, 268, 269, 272, 285, 289 Pocock, David, 16 Police, 156, 159, 162, 164, 165, 168, 169, 171 Political parties, 39, 43–45, 47, 52, 53, 55, 61, 63 Postcolonial, 191 Postcolonial Feminism, 123–124, 126 Privation, 155, 161–164, 173 Protestant Ethic, 11 Public-private, 268, 271, 272, 288 Public space, 268–272, 276, 277, 279, 280, 284–289 Purdah, 153–174 Purdah modalities, 154, 155, 158

 INDEX 

R Race, 181–184, 195, 211, 212, 214, 224, 228 Racial, 206, 207, 211–216, 220, 222, 223, 226, 227 Racialization, 205–228 Reductive logic, 7 Religion, 208, 210–213, 215, 222–224, 226 Researcher, diasporic, 21–22 Resistance, 208, 210, 213, 217, 228 Respectability, 270, 273 Right-wing, 93–116 Rockefeller Foundation, 5 S Salzinger, Leslie, 13, 13n2 Secrets, 165, 172–174 Self-defense, 164–168 Self-making, 359, 374 Shopping mall, 268 Sikh Americans, 207, 208, 210, 211 Sikh diaspora, 208, 222 Singer, Milton, 11 Singh, Guru Gobind, 209, 209n5, 210 Social science, 5, 8, 9, 12, 14–19 Somatic ideology, 352, 360 South Asia, 1–27 Sponsored research, 17 Sri Lanka, 235–261 Srinivas, M.N., 15, 16, 19, 20 Stigma, 270, 277, 286–288 Structural-functionalist, 19 Suffering, 214, 219, 225, 227 Symbols, 206–210, 213, 214, 217, 218, 220, 223, 225–227 T Tamil, 236–240, 242–252 Technologies of optimization, 367

381

Temples, 235–261 Textile, 177 Theory building, 3, 7–10, 14, 17–18, 23, 27 Tigers, 235–261 Title VI, 5 Traders, 324, 325, 327, 328, 330–348 Tradition, 121–124, 126, 130–139, 141–144, 146, 147 Transgender rights, 121, 122, 129, 130, 139–147 Transnational, 206, 208, 210, 211, 213–214, 216–218, 222, 227 Transnational collective body, 207, 210, 226–228 Transnational feminist sociology, 13 Transnational racialization, 205–228 Triple movement, 72–74 Turban, 206, 207, 209, 211, 214, 216, 219–222, 225–227 Two-boat, 153–174 U Uberoi, J.P.S., 16 US, 206–208, 206n1, 207n3, 210, 211, 213, 214, 216, 217, 219, 222–225, 227, 228 U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), 16 V Vaṇṇār, 240, 245, 251 Varṇa, 237, 237n3, 241–243, 261 Veil, 154, 163, 165, 168–170, 172, 173 Veḷḷāḷar, 237–239, 241–260 Violence, 210, 214–220, 222–224, 226–228 Visible, 206, 214, 218, 220, 222, 223, 225

382 

INDEX

W Wallerstein, Immanuel, 12 War, 235–261 Weber, Max, 11 West Bengal, 37–63 White supremacists, 210–211, 222, 224 White supremacy, 208, 223 Women’s empowerment, 67, 68, 74, 88

Women’s rights, 38, 39, 41, 43–47, 51, 52, 55, 57–63 Working-class, 267, 269, 270, 272–278, 280, 283, 287–289 WRAP certification, 188, 189 X Xenophobia, 222, 225