Principal Investigator: Sebastian Schwecke

In the early 1970s, as labour activist Ajay Mukherjee remembers fondly, the combined mobilising efforts of the local unions for shopkeepers and for bullock cart drivers were sufficient for the annual Labour Day parade to stretch the entire length of the main road through the pakka mahal of the city of Banaras (Varanasi). In 2017, participation in the annual event had fallen to a few hundreds, and most of activists had been drawn from more formalized sectors of the economy. Regardless of the ebbs and flows of political mobilisation, the character of work conditions and relations in this commercially dominated town – at least at the surface – appears to have changed little over the decades. The research project studies the evolution of work conditions and labour relations in a specific segment of the informal sector of the Indian economy marked by the dominance of commercial professions and low-value services, frequently described as the bazaar, from the 1930s to the 2000s that constitutes one of the largest spheres of employment in the urban Indian economy. Special emphasis is placed on developments between 1964 and the early 1990s. Based on a set of locally acquired archival sources, and supplemented by oral histories of work in a bazaar setting, the project questions the emphasis on legal histories within the debate on the evolution of informality in Indian labour relations. Instead, it highlights the way in which patterns of spatial and social organisation in local milieus, frequently misconceived in the discourse as anachronistic, continued to shape work in this social segment throughout twentieth century history. By providing alternative modes of organisation, the bazaar shaped reactions to neoliberal and developmentalist state-led modernisation projects, each marked differently by regulatory approaches to the labour market as well as de-regulation. It also affected union-led endeavours to mobilise labour. The focus on the bazaar thus contributes to an emerging debate on the mutual reinforcement of political and social dimensions of informalisation.

