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Crossing the Howrah Bridge: Calcutta, Filth and Dwelling - Forms, Fragments, Phantasms Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay Theory Culture Society 2006; 23; 221 DOI: 10.1177/0263276406073224 The online version of this article can be found at: http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/23/7-8/221

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Crossing the Howrah Bridge Calcutta, Filth and Dwelling – Forms, Fragments, Phantasms

Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay

What I call a form-of-life is a life that can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to separate something such as bare life. (Giorgio Agamben)

Crossing the Howrah Bridge hey come in hordes, mostly from Bihar, one of the poorest states of India, poor even by Indian standards. Clutching their tin suitcases, they arrive at the Howrah station and cross the bridge to Calcutta. The motif of moving to the city and becoming a part of its underclass is so timeworn that even their folksongs have registered it. They come to Calcutta to work as rickshaws-pullers, jamadars [cleaners of sewers], day-labourers, porters, pavement-barbers, cobblers, potters, blacksmiths and so on. In many cases, these are also their caste occupations and for generations now the Bihari countryside has been ‘subsidizing’ Calcutta, so to speak, by allowing the latter to draw from the former’s pool of skilled labour. Menial work in the city being regulated by close-knit kin/caste networks, newcomers are mostly unwelcome. Yet, the lure of ‘the city of cash’, as Calcutta is known to these migrants, is great. One comes to the city not to become a citizen, not to become a city dweller, but to tide over lean seasons, to pay back a loan to the moneylender, to work as cash-earner for a big peasant family or to run away from the wrath of the upper-caste landlords or the dadas. A part of the (joint) family always stays back in the village and the bond with the village is never severed. Ramsharan is from the Arrah district of Bihar, he came to the city in his youth in search of work. He is from a landless family of the pashi caste whose traditional occupation is skinning the carcasses of dead animals. In

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Theory, Culture & Society 2006 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 23(7–8): 221–241 DOI: 10.1177/0263276406073224


222 Theory, Culture & Society 23(7–8)

Calcutta, he could not find steady work for a long time and after going through a variety of jobs, he now runs a small tea-shack. I was sitting in Ramshran’s shop in Nimtola – the cremention ground by the river Ganga where the city’s dead are burnt in pyres. The air was filled with the putrid stench of burnt human flesh. Stray dogs and buzzing flies distract the customers sitting on the benches, drinking tea from small khuries made of burnt clay. Struggling with the kerosene stove, he was explaining the meaning of the ‘artwork’ (see Plate 1) he has done on the inner wall of his shanty. In his village, people paint folk or ritual motifs on the thatched walls of their houses to ward off evil. He is no painter but he did not want to leave the surface empty. Instead of the usual calendar with the picture of a god or goddess, he wanted a specific image imprinted in his mind. Long ago, while crossing the Howrah bridge, the gateway to Calcutta (a sort of existential threshold for him), he saw an aeroplane flying quite low over the bridge. He had never seen an aircraft so close, so vivid. So he looked for a calendar or a big poster – the kind of cheap, garish posters sold on pavements – depicting the imposing Howrah Bridge, preferably with an airplane overhead. Not finding one, he decided to ‘make’ a picture himself. He pasted some cardboard on the wall and then, with strips of white paper pasted with glue, he made his own Howrah Bridge. A notional aeroplane and a helicopter were added later on the top. Beneath the picture there is a wooden platform with a lota on it. A lota is the all-purpose bowl used in subaltern households all over the Hindi-speaking belt. Ramsharan did not want the lota to be included in the photograph because he thinks that its insertion in the frame will spoil the effect of the magnificent bridge and the aerial view of it he wanted to create. On closer interrogation, it turned out that the bridge, built on the holiest of holy rivers, the Ganga, has a quasi-mystical significance for him. Further, as a poor migrant, being able to make it to the Howrah Bridge is itself a kind of watershed in his life. The Bridge has thus become an icon, capable of giving darshan.1 Hence his resistance to the coexistence of the picture of the bridge and the lota in the same plane of (photographic) representation. Why is the Howrah Bridge so seminal in his imagination? And that too juxtaposed with ‘things that fly’? In Virilio’s genealogy of modernist kinetics, where he shows how the progressive loss of the tactility of material space and a pro tanto rise in the intensity of the government of time lead to a ‘total mobilization’ of bodies and spaces, there are some mentions of a surpassed past when administrative-economic bottlenecks prevented the emergence of a unified realm. In the ‘Middle Ages’, Virilio writes, ‘The doors to the city [we]re its tollbooths and its customs posts [we]re dams, filtering the fluidity of the masses, the penetrating power of the migrating hordes’ (Virilio, 1986: 7). Is Ramsharan, then, a residual signifier of some archaic past, waiting anxiously in History’s waiting room for deliverance? I think of Ramsharan as inhabiting the same present as those living in the swanky parts of Calcutta. In this age of ‘vagabond capitalism’, ‘flexible accumulation’ and global division of labour (Calcutta, with its burgeoning IT sector, ‘software parks’ Downloaded from http://tcs.sagepub.com at GOLDSMITH COLLEGE LIBRARY on June 18, 2007 © 2006 Theory, Culture & Society Ltd.. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

Mukhopadhyay – Crossing the Howrah Bridge 223

and call centres, being one of the major beneficiaries of these developments), the typically third-world ‘informal sector’ of sweat labour is no longer viewed as an economic black hole (‘low-level equilibrium trap’ and so on), inscrutable in its dysfunctional opacity. On the contrary, it is precisely the heat of poverty and the dust of dispossession in these pockets which push down the wage and price levels, making Calcutta the preferred destination of Euro-American organizations outsourcing their work to places with vast pools of cheap labour. A certain temporalization of space (the East as the past of the West) crucially hinges on the positing of a unified spatiotemporality, so that speed, acceleration and circulation, and blockage, stasis or threshold turn out to be discrete conditions mutually excluding each other. The social thickness of our lived, entangled world, upon closer inspection, reveals itself to be composed of nonsynchronous and relatively autonomous segments that are at best organizable into something approximating a system. I refuse the epochal coherence Virilio assigns to the world. Not everyone occupies the same Now, Bloch tersely reminds us (Bloch, 1977: 22). A Small History of Dwelling: Nimtola, circa 2005 For the casual metropolitan observer strolling in the gentile parts of colonial cities such as Bombay or Calcutta, savouring the aura of post-colonial urban ‘decadence’, there is a temptation to think of the presence of Ramshrans in that part of the town as solitary, incongruous or anomalous, lacking a context or ground. In his touristic ethnography of ‘public sleeping’ in downtown Mumbai (Bombay), (Appadurai, 2000: 627–51) Arjun Appadurai casually characterizes these bodies (that is, the persons he encountered only as bodies) ‘sleeping . . . on park benches and street corners’ as ‘simply taking their housing on the hoof’. These are, supposedly, ‘bodies that are their own housing’. That is to say, their sense of dwelling unproblematically coincides with the physical boundaries of their corporeal bodies, signifying an extreme form of dispossession. ‘Public sleeping is a technique of necessity for those who can be at home only in their bodies’ (Appadurai, 2000: 638). Taking a top-down, almost a managerial view of ‘the housing problem’, Appadurai didn’t bother to wait for these sleepers to wake up and then to follow them to their dwellings, located in places deemed unfit for the visit of respectable metropolitan anthropologists. These generic labels – ‘homeless’ or ‘street people’ – are inadequate. The spatial predicament of poor migrants in big cities like Calcutta or Bombay cannot be viewed as mere anomaly or incongruity in a landscape of organization and order. On the contrary, they are very much part of the spatial economy of the city rather than signifying its excess, or fault line. To the extent these arrangements (that is, ‘public sleeping’) are institutionally negotiated and these institutions in turn tend to be become self-organizing, acquiring durability and density, the dwelling of the dispossessed cannot be viewed as mere contingent and perverse side of the city’s spatial economy. It becomes a form of life that needs to be explored in its own terms rather than from the macro perspective of some well-meaning ‘housing policy’. Downloaded from http://tcs.sagepub.com at GOLDSMITH COLLEGE LIBRARY on June 18, 2007 © 2006 Theory, Culture & Society Ltd.. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.


In fact, there are vast, segregated areas of Calcutta and Howrah called jabardakhal basties [unauthorized slums or shantytowns] where only the likes of Ramasharan live. These shanties spring up by the side of the railway tracks, on the banks of the canals through which the toxic waste water of the city flows to the river and the marshlands, in bus-shelters meant to for commuters waiting for buses – in fact, in any place where there is a bit of empty space. Devoid of all civic and other amenities (water, drainage, toilets, electricity), the residents of these shanties live a precarious existence because they happen to be the first casualty of the World Bank-funded urban cleansing drives. Compared to them, the residents of registered basties are a privileged lot. Ramshran is lucky in this respect because he managed to build a small shack adjacent to his tea-shop. Though unauthorized and built with disposable materials like tarpaulin, bamboo, corrugated tin and asbestos, he is happy with his achievement because his family now has a roof over their head. Not everyone is so lucky. Late at night, he often witnesses pitched battles among rival ‘sleepers’ for a sleeping ‘lot’ in the verandahs of dilapidated old buildings. There are organized rackets involving gangs, cops and the local mastans [ruffians] who auction off the available sleeping spaces to the potential ‘sleepers’ – homeless working people, beggars and destitute of the pada [locality]. The collection of tolla [protection money] and its division among the contending parties often leads to serious trouble involving gunfights, murders and arrests. Ramshran paid a hefty sum to the racket and still pays a weekly hafta. But that’s not the end of the story. His everyday life is shot through with fears (of demolition of his shack by some passing police hallagadi), pressures, insecurities and deep-seated anxieties (loss of izzat [honour] of his teenage daughter, for example). A roof: that’s about it really. They sleep on the floor, in makeshift beds and there is a mud oven made by his wife along with a platform and small shelf to keep the utensils. They cook twice, with coal as fuel and the room gets filled with smoke. Kerosene (purchased on the ‘black market’ because they have no ‘ration card’ – unobtainable unless you have a proper address and the right connections) is too expensive to be used as cooking fuel. The smoke is good in a way, Ramshran points out, because it drives out the mosquitoes and the flies. Those who cannot afford to sit in peace under their own roof and eat their khana cooked by their wives, are unfortunate. Retorting to my quip that asbestos is dangerous and may cause painful disease and even death, he points out in a flourish that he would rather die under an asbestos roof than go without one. Appadurai’s point about dispossession under conditions of urban anomie and severe scarcity of space would not be disproved by the sheer fact that squatters sometimes manage to find a place. Rather, his larger argument has to do with habitus, defined by Bourdieu with reference to Poincaré, as the notion of ‘inner space’ linked unalterably to our bodies and carried about with us wherever we go. ‘Bodies that are their own housing’ would signify a radical breakdown in habitus in response to what can be called, after Benjamin, ‘the state of emergency’ which is ‘not the exception Downloaded from http://tcs.sagepub.com at GOLDSMITH COLLEGE LIBRARY on June 18, 2007 © 2006 Theory, Culture & Society Ltd.. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.


but the rule’ in the life of the oppressed. But dwelling is not coeval with the physical structure called a ‘house’, there is more to home than the mere fact of occupation of a building (Ingold, 1995: 57–80). ‘[D]o the houses in themselves hold any guarantee that dwelling occurs in them?’ – the philosopher asked rhetorically (Heidegger, 1978: 324). Transported in a time of what Bhabha called, in a somewhat different context, ‘unhomliness’ (Bhabha, 1994: 9) and, a place where existence is marked by a tenebrous sense of survival, taking the measure of your dwelling in a state of incredulous terror, this question reverberates uncannily with meaning. Ramsharan’s home marks not just the strife, the violence inflicted on those who carry a sense of deep historical displacement, it also forces us to relocate the very question of home and its relation to the world. Dwelling, according to Heidegger, to cut a ponderous argument short, is a ‘staying with things’. Dwelling is a state of being, of ‘caring’ for things, a ‘preserving’. Ramsharan’s shack is windowless and so dark that even during the day it takes time to get used to the flickering light emitted by the kerosene lamp. The only piece of furniture is the big earthen oven situated alongside a raised platform with a small shelf (see Plate 3). The shelf is decorated with glossy cellophane paper cut into patterns and changed once a year, during the Chat Puja ceremony when all victuals are ritually destroyed. The shelves contain cheap aluminum utensils (scrubbed with coal-ash and mud twice a day and washed clean with water). Ramsharan feels privileged to be able to live so close to the holy river that he can afford to clean his utensils with the auspicious Gangamaiki mitti, the mud scraped from the bank of the river Ganga. So, even when the very recesses of the domestic space become sites of most intricate invasions, dwelling does not make way to mere lodging. And this sense of dwelling, the desire to cherish and protect, to preserve and care for, is better viewed as a relentless and quotidian struggle rather than an idyllic, lyrical, bucolic equilibrium – ‘a primal oneness’, as the philosopher puts it in his lofty language, with the ‘fourfold’: earth and sky, divinities and mortals. As a matter of fact, the sky is rarely sighted – even the blinding light of the midday tropical sun rarely reaches the hovels. Sunlight and sky – these are luxuries reserved for those who live in the upper echelons of proper brick-built houses. In the alleyways, coal-chullahs are lit during the wee hours of the day filling the place with sulphurous, asphyxiating smoke. The men must be fed before they leave for work, and until they return in the evening, the outside – courtyards, pavements, alleys, sidewalks, the little platform around the tubewell where one goes to fetch the drinking water – is taken over by women and children who withdraw inside the enclosed domestic space as soon as the men come back from work. Out in the open, women chat among themselves, in a tongue that varies according to the dialect of the village they hail from. They talk about their quotidian lives, things they have cooked, about children, about their families they left in their villages. They lash out at each other over alleged small thefts, share of tap water, casting of evil spells, over issues that are arcane and dark. Downloaded from http://tcs.sagepub.com at GOLDSMITH COLLEGE LIBRARY on June 18, 2007 © 2006 Theory, Culture & Society Ltd.. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.


Quarrels can go on for hours on end, depending on the gravity of the situation and the energy of the participants. Sometimes hungry men come back home to find women fighting among themselves over ‘trivial’ issues. They are then beaten into silence. Decolonizing Filth: Shit and (Non-)State Formation(s) The conspicuousness, or, one could almost say, the public display of filth in Calcutta as a whole, can be read as symptomatic of the cracks in the received wisdom contained in the municipal-civic ‘master discourse’. I want to read this as metonymic of a different constitution of the civic as such. Even in the upmarket quarters of the town, such as old Ballygunj, garbage is deposited in open vats with flies, dogs, cats and rats cordoning off the area. It is disposed off manually, in wheelbarrows, despite the fact that most ‘dustbins’ (Calcutta’s sociolect for garbage dumps) also happen to be used as public toilets, making a vice out of necessity. The landscape of the shantytowns of Beleghata or Tangra (not far from Nimtola) built to accommodate the poorest of the working poor of the city, are laced with filth: filthy cesspools, filthy puddles, roads littered with garbage and used plastic bags and bottles, bodies of water that have become sewers and whose surfaces have become solid crusts of filth. Yet, this ubiquity of filth does not seem to have stroked the kind of bourgeoisie hysteria about filth which saw to an epochal interiorization of it in ‘the “body” of the city’ during the great metropolitan urban transformations of the 19th century (Stallybrass and White, 1986: 125). Calcutta never had its Chadwick or Mayhew. The paradox is that public indifference to filth is coupled with the most scrupulous attention to ‘private’ cleanliness (Kaviraj, 1997: 12–32). The interiors of shanties, not to speak of proper houses, are kept squeaky clean. The spectacle of men, women and children washing themselves in the open with great gusto – in hydrants, in wayside taps, in tubewells, in rivers, lakes and tanks, in the jets of water leaking out through the huge municipal pipes – is a sight so familiar that any account of public culture in Calcutta would remain grievously incomplete without it. This postcolony was never haunted by the spectre of the ‘the Great Unwashed’ (an English expression which emerged in the 1830s London out of the paroxysms about cleanliness and the bourgeoisie hysteria about dirt and filth). The vortex of Calcutta’s symbolic economy of abjection is centred on the domestic sphere. The purity of the inside must be wrested from the ‘polluted’ outside. This inside/outside divide inheres in the symbolic valorization of the body too, making the feet and the shoes the embodiments of impurity. Once waste is pushed out of the physical boundary of the house, it then belongs to the ‘public’ (a word that has passed into spoken Bengali and Hindi) domain, meaning a nebulous zone, a kind of negative ‘commons’ which belongs to nobody in particular (‘public’ is used interchangeably with sarkari, meaning pertaining to the authorities – government, for example) and therefore, everybody is entitled to dump rubbish or even defecate in it. Innumerable well-meaning projects of municipal and other civic bodies to Downloaded from http://tcs.sagepub.com at GOLDSMITH COLLEGE LIBRARY on June 18, 2007 © 2006 Theory, Culture & Society Ltd.. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.


discipline pissing and shitting in public places or to sensitize the public about the evils of throwing garbage on the street, have failed. For India as a whole, the World Bank’s longstanding project of ‘privatization’ of excrement by encouraging rural people to build a privy in their houses rather than defecate in the wood, has not borne much fruit. Sewers and, more generally, waste disposal systems, literally connect the public with the private. Dominique Laporte’s insistence that ‘the state is the sewer’, is true in more than one sense of both terms (Laporte, 2000: 56). His History of Shit is not just an exercise in thinking of sewers as another technology of governmentality and management of ‘bio-power’, not a history of the removal and evasion of the negative, of the biological excess, but also of its active exploitation. Like Foucault’s treatment of sexual repression (‘the repressive hypothesis’), Laporte explores changing relations to shit not as inexorable denial and repression but as the complex ordering and exploitation of the negative. So, panic in the face of shit isn’t simply instinctual or personal. Shit is out and out political. In India, the visibility of shit or persons defecating in public has given rise to a range of reactions, from plain horror or loathing to a kind of ecological and moral righteousness which derives its authority from fundamentalist assumptions about nature, purity and ‘human dignity’. Appadurai’s apologia of World Bank sponsored public toilet projects amounts to such righteousness. He takes it as axiomatic that all other practices of shitting, except the one associated with western toilets with ‘good sewage systems, ventilation and running water . . . [are] humiliating practices’ (Appadurai, 2004: 79, emphasis added). In effect, his account denies a range of political responses and forms of power, thereby foreclosing other reactions to pollution beyond moralism or resentment. His insistence on maintaining the moral purity of categories – dignity, humiliation, purity, pollution, right, wrong – excludes a more porous field of responses. But putting shit and filth up for reconsideration does not mean a passive withdrawal from activism. On the contrary, it means engaging with popular or subaltern practices as ethico-political responses and reflecting on their sources of authority rather than simply denigrating them from the vantage point of some absolute wisdom. In Calcutta, while top-down approaches to the problem of defecation in public or throwing garbage on the street have failed miserably, other grass-roots approaches have been partially successful. Planting saplings on the sidewalks and painting pictures of gods, goddesses or nationalist icons on the walls most vulnerable to pissing, have been highly successful. Formation of citizens’ committees consisting of persons with records of altruism and public sprit at the grass-roots level to enforce regulations concerning garbage disposal have been remarkably successful in localities with close-knit communities in north Calcutta. What these examples go on to show is that there are other authorities apart from and above those we commonly associate with civil society in liberal democracies: namely, the state, the municipality and so on. Downloaded from http://tcs.sagepub.com at GOLDSMITH COLLEGE LIBRARY on June 18, 2007 © 2006 Theory, Culture & Society Ltd.. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.


Children in the Public Sphere ’Homelessness’ in the west also signifies anomie and moral deprivation, deriving from the supposed absence of the sheltering institution of society (family, marriage, childrearing) among the homeless. The predecessors of the category of the homeless – ‘the poor’, ‘la misère’, ‘the ragpicker’, ‘la bohème’, ‘pauper’, ‘vagabond’, ‘the rabble’, ‘lazzaroni’, Marx’s ‘lumpenproletariat’ – had the undertone of moral depravity attached to them which was a fallout of their rootlessness. The thrust of this rhetorical economy of the discourse about the urban poor was to represent them as a spectacle of heterogeneity that defies categorization. According to Stallybrass, this unrepresntablity, this ‘specularized difference’, was constitutive of the ‘homogenizing gaze of the bourgeoisie’ (Stallybrass, 1990: 70). But the breakdown of the moral community was not just a figment of bourgeoisie imagination (Polanyi, 1957: 77–111). The ‘unrepresentableness’ of a ‘surplus’, marginal population of disenfranchised and dispossessed urban masses living outside of any embedding context and divested of all robust social location, presented itself as a major problem of social optic. It was precisely in response to this crisis of social representation that a whole range of new discourses (statistics, sociology, urbanism etc.) and discursive objects (population, public health etc.) started emerging from around the middle of the 19th century (Dean, 1992: 214–55; Mercer, 1997: 217–23). My foray into 19th-century metropolitan social history is necessitated by the need to place things in perspective: today’s ‘homeless’ and ‘streetchildren’ are discursive offshoots of the economy of discourse whose ostensible purpose is the government of poverty. In this context, I want to signpost here the unthought of the problem of urban poverty in what Chatterjee evocatively called the ‘East’ (Chatterjee, 1998). Under the hegemonic sway of the orchestrated discourse called the ‘global civil society’ initiative which seeks to take over the business of governance of the social sector in poor countries like India, the urban poor exists as a normative figure in need of ‘empowerment’ (Appadurai, 2004: 63). In the course of carrying out the business of empowering, the funded NGOs take as given certain normative assumptions about the urban poor and seek to imprint the semantics of citizenship (‘the capacity to aspire’) which foreclose the Indian urban poor’s self-construction(s) as busttee-dweller or squatter. Poverty in the ‘East’, to use Chatterjee’s enticing trope again, is seldom experienced by a standalone person in isolation, it occurs in the embedding context of family and kinship. There are thousands of poor rickshaw-pullers in Calcutta who spend lager parts of their lives in the city remitting their savings to their families in rural Bihar where they do not spend more than a few months every year during the busy agricultural season and the periods of festivals. What to make of this urban poor who do not aspire to be citizens, who experience their habitation in the city as transitory phenomena? Even the most vulnerable among the homeless street people of Calcutta, the ‘street children’ or urchins, who appear to be ‘floating’ or vagrant, have strong anchorage in family. As recent research shows, far from Downloaded from http://tcs.sagepub.com at GOLDSMITH COLLEGE LIBRARY on June 18, 2007 © 2006 Theory, Culture & Society Ltd.. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.


being ‘abandoned’ by their families, as the funded NGOs working with the ‘street children’ call them, the Calcutta street children are esteemed members of families to whom they return periodically (Balagopalan, 2006). Bangladeshi children illegally crossing borders to come to Calcutta take great risks to go back to their families during Id festival, defying barbed wire and the risk of being arrested or shot by border guards. In the case of girls, who mostly work as household maids, the cash they earn is usually deposited with their parents for their wedding expenses. ‘Abandonment’ is a category predicated on a Western bourgeois understanding of childhood and family which construes the street children as victims of either a sinister underworld of trafficking cartels and prostitution rackets, or as the unlucky offspring of negligent and lazy parents. The imputed essentialist assumptions about these children’s lives hegemonize these children’s identities who left home to earn much-needed extra cash and who form kinship ties in the city itself. These children form ‘families’ with other street children and older members from their immediate community, persons who do not fit within the Western idea of family. Kinship is not to be conflated with blood-relation, another restrictive Eurocentric idea which has impeded understanding for a long time (Schneider, 1984). The child-beneficiaries of programmes run by NGOs, themselves disavow the category of ‘street children’ by taking recourse to their kinship networks to distinguish themselves from pother shishu (literal Bengali translation of the category ‘street children’, as used by the NGOs) (Balagopalan, 2006). Even among the truly homeless who erect temporary, ramshackle tentlike structures on pavements or by the side of the tramways, or those who live inside sewage pipes dumped temporarily on the roadside, the ties of family and community do not seem to have broken down or disintegrated. They move away from one place to another in search of vacant spaces (but usually within a circumscribed locality, because of the nature of their fixedpoint work) as a community consisting of extended family units (jointfamily). Marriages take place through village kinship networks. Desertion of wife and children is not uncommon but rape or abduction of women by outsiders is virtually unheard of. Most stringent community punishments are meted out for such transgressions. Illegitimate children are also rare. Calcutta’s children on the street who use the street as their home, their place of work, and their sites of play, are neither out of touch nor out of place. Their putative ‘placelessness’ has to do with the middle class gaze that rests uneasily on their ubiquitous presence on the street and is constituted by the category’s (‘street child’) all-consuming understanding of them as victims who have been denied some ‘ideal’ childhood. Their inherent neglect, their psychosocial maladjustment, their being outside of a familial environment – all these are the tropes of an absent signified since there is no child behind the category ‘street child’ except the one that the category itself sets in place. In poor households of outcast Calcutta, children are adored and considered as productive assets of the family. Education, when the parents can afford it, is considered as value-addition. Unless one idealizes the Downloaded from http://tcs.sagepub.com at GOLDSMITH COLLEGE LIBRARY on June 18, 2007 © 2006 Theory, Culture & Society Ltd.. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.


Western bourgeois parent–child relationship as the norm, productive activities of the children – foraging, ragpicking, hawking, tending pigs and goats, getting into petty crimes, selling vegetables and taking care of younger siblings – cannot be viewed as indexes of their victimhood. In fact, these cannot even be categorically separated from play as the latter remains enmeshed with work. The Subaltern and the Citizen: On Reclaiming the Streets For the last five years or so Calcutta is increasingly being showcased, by a government claiming allegiance to a left-of-centre agenda, as one of the more ‘progressive’ cities of India, eager to respond positively to the dictates of neoliberal global restructuring in order to attract Foreign Direct Investment. Funded by the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, WHO, Department for International Development (UK) and other international bodies, an urban cleansing of Calcutta is well under way. As a concerted effort is being made to improve the ‘image’ of the city, control over decisions about the city’s future is being transferred from elected bodies to Multinational Corporations, ‘experts’ of transnational organizations, real estate vested interests, foreign investors and funded NGOs, none of whom are accountable to any electorate. The most conspicuous examples of such disenfranchisement are the recent decisions regarding the hasty construction of numerous expensive ‘fly-overs’, ‘by-pass’ expressways, satellite townships, vast complexes and shopping malls with foreign capital, a drastic reduction of pavement space and walkways. All these were done on the basis of ad-hoc, behind-closed-doors decisions, keeping the public completely in the dark. These go hand in hand with drastic reduction in the sphere of the activities of the elected civic bodies including the Calcutta Municipal Corporation whose various welfare oriented activities benefiting the poor (schools, housing for the poor, clinics etc.) are gradually being phased out. Predictably, the poor have to bear the burnt of this ‘funkification’. Eviction of squatters, hawkers and virtually forcible seizure of agricultural land with little compensation from the peripheral areas of the town, have become the order of the day. Plans are afoot to rid Calcutta of its famed rickshaws, a decision that would uproot at least 30,000 very poor Bihari migrants. This project of urban cleansing, if carried out unhindered, would also mean the beginning of the end of Calcutta’s colourful street culture, vibrant neighbourhoods and above all, its distinctive political culture of survival, of solidarity, of being in common. Driven by the subaltern history of what Henri Lefebvre called citadins (inhabitants of the city irrespective of their formal civic status), I have hinted how ‘non-state formations’ emerge out of the negotiations of the city form with the practice of dwelling of those with the moral attributes of an ascriptive rather than an associative community. ‘Dwelling’ and ‘survival’ are my tropes for marking out a political space outside of the fragile margins of metropolitan civility. A few months ago, in protest against the government’s decision to ban rickshaws from the streets of Calcutta, thousands of rickshaw-pullers took to the streets in a Downloaded from http://tcs.sagepub.com at GOLDSMITH COLLEGE LIBRARY on June 18, 2007 © 2006 Theory, Culture & Society Ltd.. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.


spontaneous and silent long-march. Rather than festoons and placards with political slogans written on them, as is the norm here in political rallies, they upheld little brass bells in their hands. These bells are used in rickshaws as horns. And this symbolism of the bell, meaning a kind of entitlement to subsistence as understood in the archaic idiom of politics of the caste-society, found tremendous purchase, even in the media. The decision regarding the rickshaws was stalled, and subsequently, invoking the ‘ethic’ of ensuring the subsistence of subjects, the government declared the reversal of their erstwhile policy of banning hawkers from Calcutta streets. These are indexes of a certain defeat, however localized or temporary, not just of privatopia but of neo-liberal public policy as such, which values efficiency and accumulation over and above the survival of the multitude. Acknowledgement Grateful acknowledgement to Manas Ray who found plenty to criticize. These jottings are dedicated to John Hutnyk and Mick Taussig – peripatetic videshis enthralled by Calcutta. Note 1. In his magisterial work on Indian devotional chromolithographs, Christopher Pinney has drawn our attention to the embodied, corporeal aesthetics (as opposed to the practice of disinterested representation) immanent in the Indian practice of darsan, of seeing and being seen by the deity, which is physically transformative (Pinney, 2004: 8–12). References Appadurai, Arjun (2000) ‘Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial Mumbai’, Public Culture 12(3): 627–51. Appadurai, Arjun (2004) ‘The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of Recognition’, pp. 59–84 in V. Rao and M. Walton (eds) Culture and Public Action. Stanford, MA: Stanford University Press. Balagopalan, Sarada (2006) The ‘Street Child’ and a Child on the Street: On the Production and Consumption of ‘Reform’ and its Effect on Children’s Self-constructions, Occasional Paper. Delhi: Centre for Studies in Developing Societies. Bhabha, Homi K. (1994) ‘Introduction: Locations of Culture’, pp. 1–18 in Homi K. Bhabha The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bloch, Ernst (1977) ‘Nonsynchronicity and the Obligation to its Dialectics’, Mark Ritter (tr.), New German Critique 11: 22–31. Chatterjee, Partha (1998) ‘Community in the East’, Economic and Political Weekly 32(6). Dean, Mitchell (1992) ‘A Genealogy of the Government of Poverty’, Economy and Society 21(3): 214–55. Heidegger, Martin (1978) ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, pp. 323–39 in D.F. Krell (ed.) Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Ingold, Tim (1995) ‘Building, Dwelling, Living: How Animals and People make Themselves at Home in the World’, pp. 57–80 in Marilyn Strathern (ed.) Shifting Contexts: Transformations in Anthropological Knowledge. London: Routledge.


232 Theory, Culture & Society 23(7–8) Kaviraj, Sudipta (1997) ‘Filth and the Public Sphere: Concepts and Practices about Space in Calcutta’, Public Culture 10(1): 12–32. Laporte, Dominique (2000) History of Shit. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mercer, Colin (1997) ‘Geographies for the Present: Patrick Geddes, Urban Planning and the Human Sciences’, Economy and Society 26(2): 211–32. Pinney, Christopher (2004) Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India. London: Reaktion. Polanyi, Karl (1957) The Great Transformation. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Schneider, David (1984) A Critique of the Study of Kinship. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White (1986) ‘The City: The Sewer, the Gaze and the Contaminating Touch’, pp. 125–48 in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Stallybrass, Peter (1990) ‘Marx and Heterogeneity: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat’, Representations 31: 63–90. Virilio, Paul (1986) Speed and Politics, Mark Polizzotti (tr.). New York: Semiotext(e).

Figure 1 © Achinto Bhadra



































Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay (text) was born and educated in Calcutta. A vernacular intellectual, he has been involved in various mobilizations in Calcutta, including those of the poor working people. He has published essays and articles in English, Bengali and French, mostly on India. He now teaches Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London and the title of his forthcoming book on vernacular responses to globalization is, (Un)Made in India: The Global, the Local, and the Vernacular. Achinto Bhadra (photos) is a photographer and visual ethnographer of development. Apart from various national and international exhibitions (Calcutta, Delhi, London, Paris), his work appeared in many books and publications. He has received many prestigious awards and fellowships. He lives and works in Calcutta.
