Description

This talk explores possibilities for developing a grounded critique of capitalism in contemporary India, drawing on the politics and cosmologies of migrant workers in Delhi. I begin by discussing the workings of categories (e.g. freedom, dignity, and consciousness), the ambivalence towards religion, and the relative absence of workers’ categories and self-understandings in works of Indian labor studies. Next, I describe the intertwining of politics and cosmology in the discourses and activities of migrant workers working in a metal polishing factory of Delhi. According to the implicit visions of workers, oppressive, work-intensifying processes in factories arise due to a dynamic interplay between souls and the present, ‘decivilizing’ epoch (the Kalyug in Hindu cosmology, the impending Qayamat in Islam), in which thoughts, actions, and dealings become distorted by egoistic and demonic proclivities. Workers attempt to non-cooperate with this distorting interplay through body-conserving resistances, humor and joking, multiple forms of collectivity, public protests, and religious festivity. Through these ‘anti-decivilizing’ activities, workers create possibilities for survival, respect, integrative relations, and glimpses of justice. I conclude by suggesting how categories from multiple sources (workers, proximate discourses, and remote thinkers) might be integrated to construct a grounded, immanent critique of capitalism, which analyses oppressive practices of capital and the state, recognizes distortions in workers’ activities, and intimates possibilities for autonomous transformations in workers’ worlds.

Shankar Ramaswami is a Lecturer on South Asian Studies at the Department of South Asian Studies at Harvard University, where he teaches courses on anthropology, religion, literature, and cinema. He completed a B.A. in Economics at Harvard College and a Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is currently working on a book entitled, Souls in the Kalyug: The Politics and Cosmologies of Migrant Workers in Delhi.