Abstract
This talk will explore the lives, thought-worlds, and struggles of migrant workers working in a metal polishing export factory in the Okhla Industrial Area of Delhi. The workers of the Okhla factory, I argue, become entangled in activities which give rise to work intensifications, bodily hazards, surface-level respect relations, and competitive envy. According to workers’ implicit cosmological visions, these activities can be seen to arise from a dynamic interplay of souls and the Kalyug (the present, ‘decivilizing’ epoch in Hindu cosmology), in which thoughts, actions, and dealings become distorted by egoistic and demonic proclivities. Workers attempt to non-cooperate with these entangling processes through body-conserving resistances, humor and joking, efforts at collectivity, struggles for justice, deeper respect relations, and religious festivity. Through these attempts at what one might term, ‘anti-decivilizing’ activities, workers create possibilities for survival, respect, integrative relations, and glimpses of justice. By working with categories and practices in workers’ milieus, the talk draws attention to multiple forms of politics, strivings, and self-understandings that are alive in the worlds of migrant workers in Delhi.
Bio
Shankar Ramaswami is Lecturer on South Asian Studies and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of South Asian Studies at Harvard University, where he teaches courses on anthropology, literature, cinema, and religion. He completed a B.A. in Economics at Harvard College and a Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is currently writing a book entitled, Souls in the Kalyug: The Politics and Cosmologies of Migrant Workers in Delhi.