Dr Thomas Chambers

Networks, Labour and Migration among Indian Muslim Artisans provides an ethnography of life, work and migration in a North Indian Muslim-dominated woodworking industry. It traces artisanal connections within the local context, during migration within India, and to the Gulf, examining how woodworkers utilise local and transnational networks, based on identity, religiosity, and affective circulations, to access resources, support and forms of mutuality. However, the book also illustrates how liberalisation, intensifying forms of marginalisation and incorporation into global production networks have led to spatial pressures, fragmentation of artisanal labour, and forms of enclavement that persist despite geographical mobility and connectedness.

By working across the dialectic of marginality and connectedness, Thomas Chambers thinks through these complexities and dualities by providing an ethnographic account that shares everyday life with artisans and others in the industry. Descriptive detail is intersected with spatial scales of ‘local’, ‘national’ and ‘international’, with the demands of supply chains and labour markets within India and abroad, with structural conditions, and with forms of change and continuity. Empirically, then, the book provides a detailed account of a specific locale, but also contributes to broader theoretical debates centring on theorisations of margins, borders, connections, networks, embeddedness, neoliberalism, subjectivities, and economic or social flux.    

This ethnographic chapter focuses on interactions between poor Muslim women, various intermediaries/brokers, and the Indian state. The chapter illustrates the complexities of claim-making and the forms of subjugation/marginalisation Muslim women experience when attempting to access resources, documents or paperwork. Contrary, however, to many representations of Muslim women’s engagements with the state, we also draw out agentive aspects as women hustle and negotiate to make claims and assert citizenship rights. Outcomes are variegated but also incorporate some women in brokerage roles, challenging assumptions regarding state/people mediation in India which foregrounds male brokers. The empirical detail is situated in a theoretical context incorporating gendered distinctions between shifting imaginaries of ‘nation’ and lived experiences of the ‘everyday state’. In a context where ‘nation’ has been evoked and articulated as a feminine form – through evocations of mata (mother) – we show how shifts towards a masculine imaginary, symbolised within Hindunationalist discourses, impacts Muslim women’s subjective experiences. We also illustrate that, whilst gendered imaginaries of ‘the nation’ are shifting, the ‘everyday state’ has long been experienced as a masculinised formation. Here we show how embodied involvements with the everyday state were constituted through gendered bureaucratic histories, spatial configurations, urban cosmologies and broader ideologies.

In this chapter, I trace different sectors and spaces of labour.  Although I primarily frame class in Marxist terms, I also introduce more performative and practice-based interpretations.  The narrative leads into the post-liberalisation context but this cannot be fully understood without considering pre-colonial class relations, colonial transformations and post-independence protectionist policies.  This historization enables a deeper understanding of the ambivalences surrounding structural adjustment and liberalisation which opened up the economy, rolled back protections and divested from public sector enterprises.  As indicated by other commentators on neoliberalism, outcomes were heterogeneous and did not represent wholesale abandonment of prior economic models.  I begin this sectoral analysis by considering continuity and change in India’s agrarian economy that enables the introduction of key themes including change and continuity, the awkwardness of the class hierarchy, the interlocking of identity and labour, debt and labour bondage, mobility of labour and capital, and symbolic constructions of class.   

The Opportunity Trap by Pallavi Banerjee takes us into the life worlds of two groups of skilled Indian migrants in the United States, nurses and IT workers, and of their spouses who join them on restrictive dependent visas. From the outset, Banerjee makes clear that although a middle-class background and a good education may differentiate access to labor markets, a sense of marginalization still permeates the lived experiences of workers and is deeply embedded within the machinations of the migration regime and its associated bureaucracies. 

This article focuses on male domestic-care workers (MDCWs) in India. It explores how constructed notions of masculinity interplay with labour market structures, enable forms of labour discipline and shape labour subjectivities. The article details performative and embodied gendered practices engaged in by MDCWs, illuminates the interplay of spatial and temporal aspects of paid domestic-care work with gendered skill sets and labour roles, and connects the differentiated masculinities performed by MDCWs to the broader political economy of domestic-care labour. It also highlights how MDCWs utilise their gender to express degrees of agency vis-à-vis employers and others. The article argues that MDCWs perform masculinities in variegated ways in the face of stigma, marginalisation, and relations of servitude. These performances are not devoid of agency, but are commoditised within the political economy of the domesticcare sector and are framed within patriarchal gender norms as ‘protective care’ or as work requiring other masculine attributes.

From lack of access to basic facilities and unwarranted suspicions, male domestic workers are often undervalued and dehumanised. They also want to be included in unionisation and policy recommendations that will improve their lives.