Practices and experiences of migration in urban India which largely remain unexplored and undocumented even today has been lucidly presented through a dozen of articles in this edited volume. The book titled Migrants and the Neo-Liberal City, under the banner of Kolkata Research Group, is largely aimed at reinforcing the point that the migrant is located at the heart of the city in neo-liberal time and also accentuate the idea that migrant labourer is a critical element in the transformation of the city into rental outlet which, in turn, relegates into a site of extraction.
Looking through the vantage point of the intersection between labour and urban space, which sometimes serves antagonistic to each other, the author attempts to chronicle the changing scenario of domination and subjugation in these neo-liberal cities. This standpoint around which the whole project of the book is designed underscores a hidden process of the shift of the modern city from a ‘site of industrial production to a site of a knowledge-based economy’.
The collection of twelve essays included in this book attempt to deeply problematize many preconceived notions of life and labour in three major cities of India, i.e. Kolkata, Mumbai and Delhi, in neo-liberal India. These essays lucidly expose many social contradictions of modern global capitalism that emanated from large scale migration of unskilled and semi-skilled labour force to India’s metropolis. The papers in this volume invariably indicate increased return from a global connectedness accompanied by hyper commodification of land as a new form of social marginalisation. These contradictions are intensely observed in the increasing informality of labour and life leading to informal and precarious life and work of the migrant city.
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The central theme of the book revolves around the inherent inconsistency between two dominant images of its cities- as being the engines of economic growth at one hand and extremely inadequate and often contested space for its residents and subjects, on the other. The papers discussed in the book deeply look into the ways in which these contradictions play out in the lives of migrants, on whose labour the city thrives. They focus on the interrelations between urban policy, governance, forms of labour, migration, and neoliberalism as the political ideology motivating increasing urbanisation of India. It also shows how cities are increasingly turning into sites of conflict, fragmentation and gentrification, fragmentation and acute class conflict.
Following the general introduction of the book, the first chapter deals with a brief historical account of migration and rehabilitation of the refugees from East Pakistan and its impact on the geography and demography of the city. The paper dwells on the discriminatory attitude of the authorities towards the displaced in the forms of settlement and rehabilitations and the partisan attitude exhibited while managing the refugees. The second chapter brings together two aspects of life, livelihood and habitation practices in the city, i.e. the phenomenon of urbanisation and rural-urban migration.
Third chapter of the book attempts to problematize gendered space in urban India by interrogating our a priori understanding that workers like waste-pickers must be migrant as they do not belong the city’s formal regime of tenancy. Chapter 4 also deals with gendered domain of labour under contemporary capitalism where the female caregivers are still not recognised and thereby live in the periphery of formal and institutionalised structures. All these four chapter are drawn from the migrant experiences of Kolkata city in the neo-liberal era.
The subsequent chapter encapsulates the diversity of migrant life and work in the process of envisioning Mumbai as a global city and consequent informality of labour, displacement and resettlement leading to limited access to affordable housing. The conditions and manifestations of homeless migrants as suspended citizens and their susceptibility as being the object of public gaze has been lucidly depicted in Chapter 5 of the book.
Through the lens of Chapter 6, the author traces the trajectory of migrant life in Mumbai from a commercial town to a full-fledged neo-liberal city. The Chapter 7 of the book dwells on the anti-migrant political environment where the migrants who are physically and socially marginalised like the elderly and those involved in waste management are found to be deprived of basic social security measures and welfare schemes. The Chapter 8 deals with a preconceived notion of security guards and protectors to the city as violent and even their small actions are exaggerated and dramatized.
Since the migrant is central to neoliberal urban development and migrant labour is critical to the transformation of the city, their position in the informal, unorganised sector and their vulnerability to violence makes migrant labour and life precarious. This book documents and examines the coping strategies of such migrants, new forms of urban struggles, and resistances to legal and policy regimes. Focusing on the connections between the material conditions of labour and specific issues such as old age, rent, wage forms, etc., this book also shows how the recruitment and dispersal of this migrant labour in turn restructures urban spaces.
The chapters in this volume also run through several important strings of exclusion and vulnerabilities that the migrants in urban India experience which include their permanent presence as an intolerable but necessary factor in the logical reconstruction of the city. In this process of reorganisation of the city, migrants, especially that is drawn from poor, agrarian rural hinterlands continuously struggle to negotiate a space to ‘settle’, seek justice and claim their rights. Sociologically, much of the social strains in urban space in the recent past, orchestrated through violence, struggles, agitations and movements have its roots in this fundamental contestation with social and spatial claims of new migrants with host of vulnerabilities accompanied them.
An important addition to the growing literature on Indian urbanism and urbanisation, this book will interest policy analysts and students and scholars of sociology, migration studies, development studies, urban studies and geography.
