Beyond the Disaster: Communities of Practice and Statuses of Labor among Bhopal’s Metalworkers

Between construction yard and village: Changing relations of caste and hierarchy among Madhya Pradesh's labouring classes

“…Supervisors, who come, in the case of the oldest ones, from the manual workforce and who were, in the case of the younger ones, recruited directly after their studies, form an intermediate body, showing less distinction from the manual workers than the engineers, but still clearly affirm themselves as part of the staff and could fit in what would be a construction yard's aristocracy of labour. Hence, the construction yard's hierarchy is embedded in the opposition between “ kam ” and “ naukri ” explained by Jonathan Parry in his recent book on Bhilai's working classes, Classes of Labour (2019), except that in Madhya Pradesh, the colloquial expression opposed to “ naukri ” is “ mazduri ,” be it in the construction yards or in the urban workshops, which I also studied during my previous research (Kaba, 2022). But both overlap the distinction made by Gérard Heuzé between “service” and “work” (1996).…”

“…Guruji used to explain this disrespect for pollution premonition rules by an expression stating the unity of mankind “ insan ek hi hai ” (mankind is one), which, as we will see, he considers irrelevant back in the village. It is common to avoid conversations about caste discrimination: The same arguments were used in the Muslim neighbourhoods I studied (Kaba, 2022) and in Shah's site of study (2006). Here, there is a need to put caste and community‐related tensions aside to have peace and order in these migrant workers' dwellings.…”

“…They are hired for marginal tasks, mainly curing (wetting the concrete to avoid cracking), and, as in other construction sites (Parry, 2014), carrying building materials. As in many other contexts, such as the jute industry (Sen, 1999) or the urban workshops (Chambers, 2019; Kaba, 2022), they are discriminated against not only in terms of so‐called exposure to risk and to avoid sexual harassment but also because men deny them the ability to become skilled. Their subaltern work, exhausting but often devalorized as “easy” by men, is never recognized and always paid less, even compared to a man doing the exact same job.…”