‘We work together, we eat together’

Abstract

Among themselves and within their families, workers of a public sector power project in Orissa, constantly and intentionally, violate the restrictions on inter-caste contact that they perceive as prevailing in their various villages of origin. Subscribing to the teleology of modernisation, the workers dichotomise the industrial settlement and the village as ‘modern’ and ‘backward’ sites, respectively. Their withdrawal into these ‘backward’ villages for weddings and other rituals is explained with reference to the ‘outside’, peripheral character of the settlement. I argue that this conceptualisation hints at a spatial limitation of the institution of caste, and has, at the very least, facilitated the creation of a ‘modern’, caste-negating working class.

Beyond the unions: The Pembillai Orumai women's strike in the south Indian tea belt

“…He makes this observation in relation to the development of egalitarian ideology among plantation workers based on "equality of men on the basis of human-ness" (ibid: 414). The importance of egalitarian relations and solidarity within the working class in the stratified class order of the agrarian capitalist/industrial system has been ethnographically captured by anthropologists in various contexts (Jayawardena, 1963(Jayawardena, , 1968, in the case of British Guyanese plantations; Mayer, 1961, in Fijian Plantations;Parry, 1999, andStrümpell, 2008, in industrial settings in central India). Among South Asian plantation workers, a particular moral egalitarian society was a major factor in mediating the capitalist system of tea production which was organized around a specific sexual division of labour (For Sri Lankan Plantations, see Daniel, 1996;Jayawardena & Kurian, 2015;Philips, 2005; For northeast Indian plantations, see Chatterjee, 2001;Chaudhuri, 2013;Besky, 2014).…”

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

“…Though the context is quite different from the public sector dam in Orissa where Strümpell did his research (2008), the situation of conviviality, a state of temporary loosening of caste commensality, which does not imply a modification of caste‐based rules back in the village, is to a certain extent comparable in the Madhya Pradesh construction yards with what Strümpell observes in the public sector (Strümpell, 2008). As he states, the question of commensality is after all a question of exterior judgement by the family and the caste, and this is one of the reasons why, according to him, conviviality is so strong in the settlements he observes: The family and the caste fellows from the village almost never visit their fellows at the settlement.…”

“…In these regards, the situation here is comparable to the inter‐caste conviviality that Strümpell (2008) observes but to a lesser degree, as Strümpell finds that invitations are given to attend weddings between castes with different statuses in the migrants' village of origin, which certainly did not happen among the construction yard workers, where families were never involved in these inter‐communitarian exchanges. This is limiting the range of the relativization of the caste discrimination practised in the construction yards because, as women are seen as the bearers of caste purity, it has less consequences in terms of collective purity to make these arrangements in a context where they are not involved.…”

“…If the configuration of cosmopolitan conviviality exists, the ways in which identities at work construct themselves, mainly around concurrence and opposition, show a sharp difference with the egalitarian and class‐based ethos often found in the public sector (Parry, 1999; Strümpell, 2008). At the end of the day, the real dividing line lays between the possessors of naukri and the one in the mazduri .…”

“…For him, this modernist and nationalist class identity is typical of Nehruvian projects and of the public sector (Parry, 1999) where workers are described as much more cosmopolitan than those in the private sector (Parry, 2008, p. 327). Christian Strümpell remarks that there is a climate of conviviality between different castes as in the public sector dam that he studied in Orissa (2008), another Nehruvian project. Strümpell uses the concept of “conviviality” as a set of social relations that shape social group space and directly negate the caste order.…”