Mr Shankar Ramaswami is pursuing a PhD at the University of Chicago, USA. He has been working with the migrant workers in the metal export industries located in Delhi since 2000. This guest article by Mr Ramaswami is part of a longer article, "City and Civilizen: Migrant Workers’ Lives in Contemporary Delhi" which was first published in the journal Social Action (Issue 55, 3 (July-September 2005): 241-53). Seva Mandir sought permission from Rudolf Heredia, editor Social Action to reproduce a part of this article.

My research focuses on migrant workers working in a metal polishing factory in the Okhla Industrial Area of Delhi, producing steel artware for export to America. A part of my research attempts to understand migrant workers as seeking but not yet attaining a sense of existential belonging in Delhi. In this article I delve into migrant workers’ sense of exclusion and exile in the city, due to the absence of a feeling of true svagat (welcome), and probe workers’ use of the category of vasi (one who resides, dwells) to articulate a rich ideal of existential relatedness and duty in the world, in contrast to the abstract category of nagarik (citizen).

The factory was established in 2001, and its employment has varied from twenty-four to fifty-five workers, all of whom are male migrants from the states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Jharkhand. Workers in the factory are from a range of castes (middle castes, backward castes, scheduled castes and tribes), are predominantly Hindu, and range from seventeen to fifty years of age. A majority of these workers receive statutory minimum wages (Rs.2863-3287 per month in 2004-5), as well as legal benefits such as Employees State Insurance, Employees Provident Fund, and yearly bonus payments. Overtime payments are given at below the legal rate, and at any time, some segment of workers is given less than minimum wages and kept off the company’s muster roll.

Citizen, svagat, and exile

A core anxiety within the urban chakravyuh derives from the lack of a sense of security, belonging, and welcome (svagat) in the city of Delhi. To illustrate, I refer to the narratives and experiences of a metal polish worker (Brahma) who hails from eastern Uttar Pradesh, is presently in his forties, and first came to Delhi two decades ago. Brahma is exceedingly intelligent and articulate, and often regales workers in the factory with fables, sayings (kahavats), and stories from the epics and Puranas. He is often agitated and plagued with tensions, has a very short and volatile temper, but is also very kind and generous to others. His respectability (izzat) inside the factory has varied over time, due to his seniority in age and experience, his rebellious though occasionally collaborative comportment towards management, and his past drinking habits that had sunk him into debts.

Brahma acknowledges that he is a citizen (nagarik) of India and expresses pride towards the country and the capital, but feels a certain disappointment and disillusionment with the instrumental compact that citizenship has come to mean for the powerful and the poor alike. To politicians, he observes, nagarikta is understood primarily as a means towards the cultivation of voting constituencies and support banks amongst the poor. Hence political parties and their agents in Delhi conduct drives to encourage the registration of migrant residents, and as elections approach, disperse largesse in the form of truckloads of free daru (liquor), blankets, and saris. Poor migrants, for their part, see in attaining nagarikta in Delhi (meaning becoming a registered voter of the state) the chance to obtain an official proof of identity and residence (the election identity card) to gain a practical foothold and a psychic sense of security within a hostile city.

Although Brahma has on occasion been registered by political agents on Delhi state voter lists, he today expresses little interest in obtaining nagarikta in Delhi. While he feels a sense of right and claim to the capital, as a citizen of India, he is also deeply conscious of the absence of respect (izzat) and welcome (svagat) towards its poor and toiling workers. These are indeed the same poor persons, Brahma observes, who elect and send political leaders from distant districts to the Parliament, but it is the leaders who get true svagat in Delhi, not the poor rural voter-turned-migrant worker. For the latter, there is not only a lack of svagat (except at election time), but a visible and palpable desire to exclude and push them away from the city.

This absence of svagat is felt from three quarters: the state, the rich, and the local landlord population. First, the state has undertaken recurrent efforts and initiatives to ‘clean up’ the city, by demolishing slum colonies and relocating slum dwelling populations to peripheral parts of the city. In recent years, the state has also closed down thousands of polluting industrial units in Delhi, resulting in sudden and massive increases in the unemployed, floating, migrant population. Official discourse justifying these moves speak of the need for clean air, greenery, and good health for the ‘citizens of Delhi’, a shorthand for the wealthy, powerful, and ‘desired’ residents of the city, and directed against ‘undesirable’, poorer, migrant residents who may officially even be voters of Delhi, but live in ‘illegal’ slum colonies and work in ‘illegally’ polluting industries. What is elided is the illegal status of sprawling residences of the wealthy in colonies such as Sainik Farms, as well as the routine illegal labor practices that occur in companies, factories, shops, hotels, and restaurants across the city perpetrated by Delhi’s ‘citizen’ classes of entrepreneurs and managers. All of this has occurred against the backdrop of the evolution of larger state economic policies since the early nineties (the process of liberalization), that has created an environment in which illegal labor practices, the expansion of casual and contract work, and delayed grievance redressals are not only tolerated but ostensibly desired by the state and its complicit labor departments and courts, as was witnessed during a lockout and retrenchment episode in the metal export factory during this research.

The Delhi police is also seen as part of the anti-migrant ethos of the state, in its visible collaborations with factory managements to break up assemblages of workers at factory gates during lockouts or strikes (pejoratively addressing workers as ‘Biharis’) or in its arresting of workers conducting public demonstrations in ‘sensitive’ areas of the city such as outside of the Supreme Court (as witnessed in my research). The police also are known to speak roughly and rudely to workers proceeding home in the late night on the roads near and around the Okhla Industrial Area, demanding ‘gatepasses’ (issued by some factories after 9 pm), and occasionally locking up workers on various pretenses. In the absence of a gatepass or an identity card which might help deal with these police encounters, migrants like Brahma self-police themselves by choosing routes home where one is less likely to encounter patrol cars. And given the uncertainties in timings of payments of wages, advances, and bonuses, as well as the unpredictability of sudden illnesses and deaths in the family, pre-planning of travel to one’s village home (and advance train ticket booking) is a rare luxury. For migrants, the svagat of the state is felt by the crack of the policeman’s danda (a long bamboo stick) on one’s back as one is pushed, shoved, and jostled about in the body-crushing effort to squeeze into the packed, general compartments of eastbound trains from Delhi.

While Brahma regards the wealthy of Delhi with a remarkable absence of resentment or envy, and indeed, a certain respect, it is the excluding and contemptuous measures of the rich against the poor that he finds most disturbing, as manifested in the large gates erected around posh, ‘VIP’ colonies and the armies of security guards they employ. Although these guards are drawn from the same ‘Purvi’ (eastern) migrant population as Brahma, and often receive less wages and benefits than metal karigars, Brahma says he is wary of setting foot into posh colonies for fear of unwanted encounters and verbal entanglements with these Purvis-in-guard uniforms. Even asking directions from these guards can invite suspicion, reverse inquiries, and ridicule. To quietly seek shelter under a tree during a rainstorm, on the public street in front of a posh house, might prompt inquiries from nearby guards as to whether one is merely taking refuge or closely studying the large, expensive cars parked on the street for purposes of future theft. Such humiliating possibilities cause Brahma to avoid non-proletarian colonies of the city, although as a nagarik of India, he feels he should have the right to freely move about anywhere in the capital. But through Brahma’s internalized, self-segregating behavior, the wealthy and their employed protectors are aided and abetted in the project of creating safe havens of isolated exclusivity.

But such experiences make starkly visible to Brahma that there are two Delhis, one for the rich and ruling elites (‘hi-fi log’), the other for the common people (‘sadharan log’), and that there is remarkably little boundary-crossing and mixing between the two constituencies. If Brahma feels a fragile sense of attachment to Delhi, it is not to Delhi as a whole, but to places and persons located within the ‘proletarian city’ of divided Delhi, comprised of the industrial areas, the working-class residential colonies, and the public roads and scenery connecting factory and residence, which encompass and circumscribe the orbit of many migrants’ everyday lives.

In residential colonies of the proletarian city, as well, svagat is not easy to come by. In the urban villages of Delhi, where Gujjar landlords rent out small rooms to Purvi migrants in multi-story tenement buildings, one must live under their often rough and repressive rule (shasan). In the village of Thekhand, on the outskirts of the Okhla Industrial Area, Gujjar men are often encountered in the narrow lanes and courtyards in an inebriated condition, freely dispersing verbal and occasional physical abuse upon family members as well as Purvi renters unfortunate enough to cross their paths. Huge billboards near the entrance of the village, erected by the local corporator, read, ‘Welcome to Thekhand village’ (‘Thekhand gamv mem apka svagat hai’), but to Brahma, this is ‘khokla svagat’(hollow welcome), intended for visiting leaders and other important persons (‘bare log’) of Delhi, not for its migrant poor who must remain constantly wary of unwelcome encounters with Gujjars. Indeed, Gujjars have expressed to Brahma that despite their economic reliance on migrants for income through rent and commerce in the villages of Delhi, they harbor contempt and disdain towards them, as indicated in rude and blunt utterances like, ‘In Purviyom ne Dilli mem ake gand faila diya, Dilli ki mitti kharab kar di’ (these Easterners have come to Delhi and spoiled and defiled it). For these reasons, Brahma prefers to live in the more distant but non-Gujjar dominated areas of the outer periphery of southeast Delhi. In such colonies, Brahma observes, one faces less tensions and partakes of more free, unconstrained senses of mobility and collectivity amongst Purvi migrants.

But if migrants justify sufferings in the city by reference to sayings such as, ‘to gain something you must lose something’ (kuch pane ke liye kuch khona parta hai), much more is put at risk in the struggle for accumulation. With the scarcity of trips to the village due to the lack of sanctioned leave and the lack of amassed funds to go home ‘in style’ (with new clothes, gifts, and cash), and the omissions, obfuscations, and general non-transparency that creep into communications with the village regarding the dirty, low-paid, and dangerous nature of one’s work, migrants’ relations with their homes also become attenuated. As a migrant worker from eastern Uttar Pradesh writes in the Faridabad Mazdur Samachar (August 1998), a newspaper distributed in the Okhla Industrial Area, "After earning for two, four, six months, we are able to return home/Our own village and home appear strange to us/In our own home we are called ‘one living abroad’/Only by good fortune are we able to see our parents, wife, and children" (Do, char, chhah mahine kamane ke bad apne ghar laut pate haim/Apna hi gamv, ghar ajnabi se lagte haim/Apne hi ghar mem pardesi kahlate haim/Bhagya se hi mata-pita bivi-bacchom se mil pate haim). The anxieties of this attenuation with the village may explain why migrants develop attachments to one’s residential corner of the proletarian city, and describe their neighborhoods as feeling ‘like home’ (ghar jaisa), particularly when one is surrounded there, as Brahma is, by relations and acquaintances from one’s village and district, as well as by other metal karigars. But this home-‘like’ place is more of a space of exile, where one is stranded until such a time as one can achieve and declare ‘success’ in the drive for accumulation. It is not home in the deep sense, but rather a space of khokhlapan and struggle within the chakravyuh of the city.

City, vasi, and civilizen

This khokhlapan and absence of true svagat help to explain why Brahma does not feel like a vasi of Delhi. This is because vasi (one who resides, dwells, inhabits) connotes a relation in which a person existentially ‘belongs’ to a place, as suggested even in the simple expression ‘Maim Uttar Pradesh ka hun’ (I belong to Uttar Pradesh). A place also ‘belongs’ to its vasis, not in the sense of possession, but in the affective sense of being apna (one’s own), as in apna gamv, ghar, kshetr (one’s own village, home, region). One can be a vasi of many places, and Brahma calls himself a vasi of his village, his district, of Uttar Pradesh, of India (Bharat), and of the Earth as a while. But not of Delhi, for vasi requires one’s atma to feel at home in a place, and to feel atmik sambandh (bonds of the soul) there.

When Brahma speaks of his village, one senses the deep connections with his place of birth (janmabhumi) as well as with the persons, life forms, and landscapes of his childhood – with parents, siblings, friends with whom he played kabbadi, schoolteachers, trees, ponds, rivers, fields, forests, and village festivals of Divali, Holi, and Nagpanchami. All of these are written in some way into the atma, and the atma continues to dwell in these places, experiences, and relations. Indeed, at night, while asleep, migrants say the atma flies from Delhi to the village and to many other places of affective connection (atma bhatakti rahti hai) before one awakes. And while at work at the polish machines, one is not only in the factory: as one worker says, ‘half of my thoughts and attention are always there [the village], half here’ (adha dhyan hamesha vaham rahta hai, adha yaham).

Migrant vasis such as Brahma ‘belong’ then not only to specific places but also to the persons and life forms which inhabit those spaces, through myriad relational identities as a son, brother, husband, father, relative, caste-community (biradari) member, neighbor, friend, farmer, worker, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, human being (insan), and inhabitant of the earth as a whole. And in each of these relational identities, a vasi confronts duties and obligations (kartavya) to establish and deepen sahi izzat, talmel, and atmik sambandh. I offer the term ‘civilizen’ to describe this condition and vision of existential multi-locatedness and incumbent duty, which derives less from modern political discourses on the abstract, affectively empty, and de-contextualized ‘citizen’ with rights and claims on the state (adhikar), and more from the ‘civilizational’ ethico-political and spiritual teachings that migrants inherit and acquire from stories and discourses of village elders and school teachers, regional proverbs and sayings (kahavats), epics and religious texts, the vernacular poetry of Kabir, Rahim, and Tulsidas, popular Hindi films, and mass spiritual discourses (pravacans, jalsas).

What would it require for Brahma to feel existential belonging in Delhi, to become a Dilli vasi, to feel more at home in the city? This would be facilitated in part by more secure, legally protected, and remunerative employment and by more genuine svagat from the state, its laws and its police, the wealthy and their protectors, and local landlords. Migrants themselves also create senses of home by conjuring and reproducing memories, images, and practices associated with the village, its mores, and its landscape, in thoughts, day dreams, and conversation, in styles of language, cooking, and dressing, and in festivals celebrated en masse in proletarian colonies. But a deeper sense of home, I suspect, will depend on the abilities of migrants to develop more respectful, cooperative, and truth-seeking relations with each other in workplaces and neighborhoods of the proletarian city. For it is in sahi izzat, talmel, and atmik sambandh that one creates and finds a true home in the world. Where these are relatively absent, one is plagued by tensions, khokhlapan, and feelings of indefinite exile. With deeper, closer, and more empathetic relations in proletarian milieus, migrant vasis such as Brahma might begin to see Delhi less as a site of soul descent and attrition, and more as a space where the atma might safely, robustly, and nurturingly reside, a capital city which its country’s civilizens can begin to think of as home.