Siraj Prajapati's bi-local familyFootnote ⁷

The family unit, in Siraj's narrative, is always inscribed in space. Siraj's grand-father and his two brothers lived in a single house in the village, their nine sons occupied two. As the family grew and divided, they came to constitute a whole hamlet, where Siraj lives today. In Bengal, they lived in a rented accommodation near the Botanical Garden, Howrah until 1962, when they bought land and built houses in this locality. Born in 1939, Siraj grew up at a time when this bi-locality was well established. His eldest brother, fifteen years his elder, brought him to Calcutta when he was still a child and taught him his trade as a potter. This brother had a variegated trajectory, working for some years in the Guest Keen Williams Factory in Howrah before opening a convenience store around 1965. By the mid-1970s, he had returned to the village. Siraj and his second brother, on the other hand, continued to constitute a single economic unit, divided between the village and Howrah.

Siraj is strikingly absent from his own story. His life, marked by geographical stability and occupational continuity, is presented as devoid of turning points. All events and defining moments are credited to his uncle Sukalu, depicted as a bold pioneer, who established the family in Calcutta. Sukalu, whose sharp mind and physical prowess Siraj praises (he was a wrestler, a Pahelvan), tried his hand at several occupations before eventually settling in Howrah. He first went out to Assam “to cut wood in the jungle”, before running away to Calcutta, where he worked as a postman. This activity, however, proved unremunerative, and he circled back to his “traditional” occupation: a Kumhar (potter) by caste, he started making and selling tea cups, an activity subsequently taken up by most members of the family.

The trajectory of Mohan Lal, Mistri Footnote ⁸

Mohan Lal's story focuses on his professional trajectory. Where Siraj's narrative lacked events and turning points, Mohan's is neatly divided into three periods: his childhood and formative years, his life and work in Bengal, and his return and subsequent ventures, both in the village and outside. In our conversations, which spanned work, religion, politics and family affairs, Mohan Lal appeared in different ways – a Hindustani worker in Bengal, a trade union representative in the Titagarh Paper Mill, and a member of the Shiv Narayan Panth, a sect mostly associated with the lower caste communities of northern India.Footnote ⁹ Born into the Chamar community, among the most ritually stigmatized and socially marginal sections of society, he almost never referred to his caste identity. What he stressed above all was his professional identity as a mistri.Footnote ¹⁰

His early life was crucially marked by the death of his father, leaving him and his mother isolated. His mother managed to provide for the two of them, working first as an agricultural labourer in Bengal, and then establishing herself as a midwife (dai). As they settled in the Asansol region in the 1950s, a moment of rapid urbanisation and industrialisation in the wake of the establishment of the Durgapur Steel Plant, Mohan swiftly moves on to his own entry into the labouring life:

His meeting his guru marks the end of his formative years, from the death of his father to his establishment as a skilled worker and independent earner. The second rupture came shortly after and operated both at the professional and the personal level. After his gauna was performed and his wife settled with him in Bengal, Mohan's father-in-law arranged for him to work in the Titagarh Paper Mill.Footnote ¹¹ As a mistri Mohan was in charge of watching over the furnace and, occasionally, performing construction and repair work in the mill compound.

In 1982 the mill was put under lockout and Mohan was forced to leave Calcutta in search of a new source of income.

This apparently neat succession of stages is more problematic than Mohan presents it. This period was characterised by multiple failed ventures and short stints of work, which are either forgotten or excised from the story. In subsequent conversations further details emerged. Mohan recalled that he had spent some months around 1983 in Nagpur, Maharasthra. He remembers the year because his younger son was born when he was away. For about a year, he also obtained a licence to supervise the provision of subsidised goods in the village, where he also “built some houses.” As he struggled to recall what might have happened between his return to the village and departure for Noida, he finally concluded “I must have gone somewhere else, in between!” The vagueness of his recollections stands in contrast with the precision with which he recalled the early and later years. One might suppose that this period is elided because it does not fit in the coherent trajectory he describes, becoming a mistri, and exercising his craft, away from the village.

There is much that is similar in these two lives. Perfect contemporaries, Siraj Prajapati and Mohan Lal reside in villages about 20 km apart and spent much of their working life in two different industrial suburbs of Calcutta. Whether mistri (mason) or potter, both identified themselves as karigar (a worker with a certain degree of skill, an artisan), in reference to their quality (gun), or craft (kala). Their and their families’ trajectories straddled the line between formal and informal employment. Mohan Lal, working as a mason, moved from “private” employment on construction sites, to service (naukri) in a large-scale factory, or a combination of both. Siraj Prajapati was making and selling tea cups in Howrah along with most of his family, some of which was also employed in large scale factories or had opened small businesses in the city.

Both men are, however, separated by occupation, caste, and family structure. Though both lost their fathers at an early age, the density of Siraj's family networks contrasts with the isolation of Mohan and his mother. While both were skilled workers, the stable back and forth of the settled artisan between village and city differs from the multiple displacements of the mason. Mohan Lal moved continuously throughout his life, following shifts in regional patterns of economic activity: to the Asansol-Durgapur region, a coal mining area and a centre for the development of heavy industry in the 1950s, away from Calcutta, a struggling industrial centre by the 1980s, and finally to Noida, a booming hub of the service industry by the 1990s. Finally, the nexus between caste, occupation and identity plays a different role in the trajectories of the two men. For Siraj, a Kumhar (potter) by caste, working the earth (mati ka kaam) constitutes what he calls his jati pesha, his caste occupation. As he was born into the trade, his occupational trajectory appears natural. Mohan's professional identity, as a mistri, and caste identity, as a Chamar, stand in contrast to one another.

Both narratives share many tropes. They centre on towering male figures, whether the narrators themselves, or men in their surroundings, while women recede into the background. A similar sense of decline and detachment pervade both accounts, as the activities that took the two men to Calcutta have declined or disappeared. Yet, Siraj's near absence from his own narrative, which focuses on his bold ancestor, stands in sharp contrast with Mohan's overwhelming presence in his. While Siraj frames his trajectory as one of occupational, social and emotional continuity, through the operations of the bi-local family, Mohan builds on a set of overlapping dichotomies between the village, a space of (failed) sociability and (failed) entrepreneurship, and the outside, where he built himself up as a mistri and successfully exerted his craft. Siraj's account is fully integrated within that of his (extended) family, focusing on their dual settlement in the village and Howrah. Mohan, on the other hand, presents himself as cut off from his family and village base, as he emphasises other forms of linkages. He likes to recall the different people who came to shape and share his professional trajectory – the guru who trained him, the various contractors (thikedars) who employed him, and the other mistris with whom he became associated, both inside the factory and outside.

Settled in the city and yet rooted in the village, the two men illustrate the density of the rural-urban connections developed by the Hindustani workers employed in eastern India. These shifting spatial, occupational and social configurations have often been framed as an enduring “rural link” of the Indian labouring classes and studied for the way they shaped the modalities of the workers’ presence in the city. Historians have thus explored the way urban social nexuses built on and constantly reworked rural networks.Footnote ¹² They showed the city to be an ambiguous place, as boundaries of caste, religion and language had worked their way into the “modern” capitalist labour market.Footnote ¹³ The urban was thus integrated with the rural, and “migrants’ encounter with the city”, some scholars argued, needed to be understood as “a continuum rather than (a) dichotomy.”Footnote ¹⁴

This integrative framework offers a useful corrective to engrained dichotomies, whereby migrant workers, the embodiment of traditional rurality, are made up to be dissonant presences in the modern city.Footnote ¹⁵ Such emphasis on continuity is nevertheless problematic, in so far as it does away with the possibility of tensions and contradictions involved in spatial displacement. It reduces the movement between village and city to a simple act of connection, a transfer from one place to the other. Yet, as Siraj Prajapati and Mohan Lal's narratives reveal, the linkage of Calcutta and its industrial region to the rural tracks of northern India is constituted of multiple and repeated individual acts of spatial displacement which may take on very different forms and contents. They can involve constant back and forth, successive returns and departures and multiple displacements, and imply, in turn or simultaneously, rupture and transformation, or reproduction and continuity. Far from being a neutral shift in space, the movement between rural and urban is a culturally, socially and even politically charged act.

The move to the city has historically been associated to both moral decay and social emancipation, as Gandhian conceptions of the village as repository of the authentic Indian nation developed side by side with scathing depictions of rural areas as spaces of oppression for India's lower castes.Footnote ¹⁶ Only a move to the city, some contemporaries assumed, would allow the most stigmatized sections of society to “find an escape from the parochialism of the village.”Footnote ¹⁷ The anonymity of the urban space, they contended, would provide a release from ascribed identities while an open labour market could break the fetters of hereditary occupations.Footnote ¹⁸ Other sources provide more conflicted accounts of the move from village to city. In his autobiographical account, Tulsi Ram, who grew up a lower caste boy in a village of Uttar Pradesh in the 1950s, contrasts two forms of movement. His uncles, who went to Calcutta to work in a jute mill, embody a mobility that is essentially static as they reproduce, throughout space, relations of mental and social subservience to the upper caste elite. By contrast, his own move away from the village to Varanasi and Delhi is intertwined with social mobility and moral emancipation through education.Footnote ¹⁹ Since movement constitute the narrative thread structuring his story, Tulsi Ram's text prompts us to think of the way life narratives can be explored to write a history of mobility. Siraj and Mohan's accounts differ from Tulsi Ram's written autobiography in many important ways: the impulse to narrate came from outside, and they did not mean to craft a coherent, linear, and much less written, account. In the course of several interviews, spread over many months, both men recounted tales from their past, either by way of conversation, for they knew of my interest for the “old days”, or to answer a specific question I had asked. Some of these stories might have been told before, in other contexts, to other audiences, while simultaneously being shaped by the specific nature of our interaction. The accounts recorded and transcribed from our conversations are fragmented, at times contradictory and often vague, as recollections from memory are. By recounting them my aim is neither to treat them as factual accounts, nor to frame them into coherent biographies. Rather, I hope to show how these fragmented narratives are infused with contradictory meanings as individual and family trajectories – spatial, social and moral – are intertwined, sometimes simultaneously, with ideas of progress, decline, or the stability of “working and earning” (kamana khana).

Siraj Prajapati and Mohan Lal are distinguished by caste, occupation, political activity and religious orientations. By bringing them together, my aim in not to freeze them into types, as representative samples of two distinct sub-groups of a larger social group, the Hindustani labouring populations of eastern India. Rather, weaving the two narratives together, I wish to delineate a field of contradictions. While in Siraj Prajapati's case mobility is framed as the spatial extension of the family's social and occupational sphere, Mohan Lal stands alone in his narrative, building himself up as a mistri, away from previous social and occupational moorings. These narratives thus build on a set of tensions, between permanence and transience, stability and volatility, autonomy and constraint, isolation and integration. They are not meant, however, to embody the two extremes of a continuum from continuity to rupture: rather, by placing either rupture or continuity at the centre they show how the making of these lives over time and space involved a permanent tension between the two. Taken together, both narratives help to sketch out a history of movement: they evoke the history of the rural-urban connexion between northern India and Bengal throughout the 20^th century as simultaneously rupture and continuity.

Bengal and the “people from over here”: a segmented history

The process through which the “labour catchment areas” of UP and Bihar were linked to the Calcutta centric labour market is best understood as a process of “differential incorporation” in which migrant workers “were incorporated into a segmented and continuously re-segmented structure, which integrated differential ethnic or other identities and even created new ones.”Footnote ²⁰ Circulation did not involve the integration en bloc of whole areas, but rather the linkage of spatially, occupationally and socially specific units – a village with a given jute mill, a family or caste group with an occupational cluster.Footnote ²¹ Historians have stressed the importance of institutions such as kinship and locality in the making of the various networks linking any group to a segment of the labour market. These indeed go a long way to explain the insertion of Siraj Prajapati in a specific geographical and occupational segment.Footnote ²² On the other hand, the density of the north Indian presence, and its wide geographical range, cutting across various segments of the labour market, meant that most migrants could draw on a diverse (though not unlimited) range of networks, on the basis of kinship, caste, occupation and locality – which would include, in these patrilocal societies, both their village and their mother's native village (nanihal), as well as connections established in the urban neighbourhood where they settled. Siraj and his relatives, for instance, though they appear to be exercising their “traditional caste trade” in Howrah, have monopolized a very specific segment of the labour market. The sub-caste of northern Indian potters they belong to has established a foothold in the manufacture of earthen tea cups in Howrah and Calcutta, while the production of other types of goods has remained the preserve of local Bengali potters.Footnote ²³ Moreover, despite a strong association with tea cup making, there has been a certain degree of diversification among Siraj's family, prompted by its location in an industrial neighbourhood. Similarly, Mohan Lal found work on private construction sites in Calcutta through other mistris before securing a job in the Titagarh Paper Mill through his father-in-law, and later on going to Noida along with a group of youth from his native village.

This process of differential incorporation did not develop as a single or uniform movement. As Siraj's and Mohan's trajectories reveal, it could involve constant back and forth between village and city, or successive movements from one place to the next. This might explain why official and managerial reports have long described the “up-country migrants” as temporary presences in the city. The migrant workers, they contended, would regularly go back to their villages, where their families often remained, and where some of them had some property, whether a plot of land or a house. Such arguments had a definite self-serving character, as they were also used both by the Government of Bengal and by the jute manufacturers as a way to avoid expenses due to the maintenance of the worker when he was not productive, such as periods of illness or after retirement.Footnote ²⁴ However, they seem to hold true, more than seventy years later, for both Siraj Prajapati and Mohan Lal who did, indeed, return to their village “every few months or at least every few years”, before settling in the village once the activity that had taken them to Bengal had ended.Footnote ²⁵

Though they have been settled in Bengal for generations, the maintenance by the Hindustani labouring populations of their “rural connection” is undeniable. There is a danger, however, of homogenising and de-historicising the migrants’ connection to the city. The census data, for instance, hint towards changes in settlement patterns. Taking the example of the district of Howrah, the industrial suburb of Calcutta where Siraj and his family had settled, a number of elements stand out. Between 1901 and 1991, the number of people born in either Uttar Pradesh or Bihar enumerated in the district rose from 75,097 to 125,118.Footnote ²⁶ During the same period, the number of Hindustani speakers rose exponentially, from 85,490 in 1901 to 486,043 in 1991.Footnote ²⁷ From the 1950s onwards, a growing proportion of the Hindustanis enumerated in Howrah were thus born in Bengal itself.Footnote ²⁸ Though they kept their village connection alive, many “up-country migrants” had started building their family life in the city. So it was with both Mohan and Siraj, who moved to Bengal at an early age and whose children were born in Bengal.

This trend towards greater settlement developed in a context of industrial stagnation, especially hurtful to the Hindustani workers, who, in 1980, represented on average 45% of the workforce employed in the major industries in the region.Footnote ²⁹ In the jute industry, which drew about 65% of its labour from their ranks, employment fell from about 347,000 in 1929 to about 232,000 in 1960, following an intense rationalisation drive initiated in the 1930s.Footnote ³⁰ By 1989, it stood at 224,602.Footnote ³¹ The potential impact of industrial stagnation and decline on Hindustani workers is especially striking in the case of the paper industry. While in 1982, 18,559 workers were employed in this sector in West Bengal, by 1988 they numbered 14,975. Simultaneously, the proportion of workers from Uttar Pradesh employed in this sector declined from an average of 40% throughout the 1970s and early 1980s to 3.75% in 1988.Footnote ³² This fall in employment was directly linked to the closure of the Titagarh Paper Mills, where Mohan Lal was employed until the early 1980s. Siraj's connection to Calcutta, on the other hand, was not so closely tied to the fate of the industrial sector. Yet, the replacement of earthen ware by plastic and paper and the development of increasingly stringent environmental regulations, which did not take kindly to the potters’ kiln, produce a sense that the spatial and occupational configuration that has structured his life is about to end.

The trajectories of both Mohan Lal and Siraj Prajapati bear witness to the long and stable history of the Bengal connection and its eventual breakdown. As Siraj summarised, “Before, the son used to get his father's place. Now, the son isn't getting anything. No one is getting anything.” New avenues and spaces are now being explored. Many among the younger generations also tend to come back to the village, where they see more opportunities, though some of them had spent much of their early years and schooling in Bengal. While one of Siraj's son still lives in the same settlement in Howrah, where he still makes earthen tea cups, another son is pursuing a Master of Computer Applications in Delhi. His newly wed daughter's husband is in Saudi Arabia, where “he does some oil-related work.” One of his nephews, a sixty-year-old man who spent most of his life in Calcutta, opened a rice mill in the village about fifteen years ago, and his forty-something grand-nephew, after completing his studies in Bengal, started teaching in a private school in the nearby town of Muhammadabad. Mohan Lal himself left Bengal in the early 1980s and tried his hand at various ventures inside and outside his village. His elder son, also a mason, found employment for longer and shorter periods in various industrial complexes, in Meerut (UP), Nagpur (Maharashtra), and Noida. He is now settled in the village and looks after the family's small plot of land. Mohan's younger son works as an accountant for a company in Delhi.

Rupture and continuity in the narration of trajectories over space

In both narratives, spatial mobility is intertwined with concerns over work and family. Siraj repeatedly emphasised continuity over time and space: “We are one single family, the way it is here is exactly the same way there (jeise yahan hei, vahan bhi eisa hi hei.)” The bi-local family allows for an equivalence between “here” and “there”, thus nullifying physical distance in favour of occupational, emotional and social continuity. Mohan's narrative, on the other hand, builds on an overlapping set of polarities between the village and its outside. The village is a space of (failed) sociability, and of (failed) entrepreneurship, while the outside is associated with (successful) self-building. Away, he made himself into a mistri, and successfully exerted his craft while building, mostly on the basis of his professional identity, a new set of relationships, more fulfilling and reliable than the ascribed ones. While Siraj is concerned with spatial rootedness, the family's establishment “here” and “there” and the stable connection between the two, Mohan's indifference to location is grounded in the primacy of work over space: “If you have to work, you will work anywhere. If you work well, if you have a good nature (bhav subhav), then every place will be good.”

Siraj's narrative tends to highlight the integration of the two poles of the family's space, their settlement in Ghazipur and in Howrah. Mobility is not presented as a rupture, as the two spaces are described as complementary:

In Howrah, on the other hand, they had the necessary equipment to have the earthen wares dry, even during the rainy season. This spatial integration, through the constant coming and going of men, is brought out starkly by a repeated stress on the interchangeability of people and of places. As Siraj summarises it, “we were two brothers, so one brother worked here, and one brother worked there.” As for his elder brother “he was here too, he was there too.”

Family, occupation and space are intertwined in Siraj's narrative. The joint family structure not only linked the two places through the constant coming and going of its members. It was also of crucial importance to lay claim to space through purchase of land (in Howrah) and the progressive construction and extension of houses (both in Howrah and the village) as well as through physical presence and numerical strength. Relationships within this patriarchal household developed as a complex of patronage, solidarity and exploitation, on the basis of hierarchies of gender and age.Footnote ³³ Siraj recalled that his uncle Sukalu built such a successful business that he “started keeping 5–10 servants”, including his own nephew, Siraj's elder brother. Similarly, his brother's success at running his store was exemplified by his ability to “keep” people. All these servants (naukar) belonged to the family unit:

In Howrah as in the village, procurement of raw material (clay, fuel) and distribution of finished goods happened at the level of the family.Footnote ³⁴ The bi-local family therefore constituted the main unit of production and reproduction and was also the unit within which skill was transmitted.Footnote ³⁵ Siraj's elder brother was trained by, and worked with their paternal uncle Sukalu, following the untimely death of their father, and later played the same role for Siraj. It is also interesting that the above quote is one of the only instances when Siraj mentions the female side of the family. Women are largely invisible in this narrative, though they participated actively in the making and maintenance of the bi-local unit of production and reproduction. Siraj's wife remembers that she was “called” to Howrah shortly after her wedding by her brother in law – Siraj's elder brother – “in order to cook food” (for them, their children, and possibly the people working with them). For thirty years, her constant labour, back and forth between the village and Howrah, served to maintain the bi-local household. In Siraj's account however her presence, as that of the other women of the family, remains implicit.

The contours of the family unit, which Siraj referred to as his goshti (group, assembly), khandan (clan), or kutumb-parivar (family), were rather flexible. It encompassed the immediate blood relatives, especially those sharing the same bi-local space, but also included more distant and affinal relatives, who came to live and work with them in Howrah. It was further divided between different – and constantly re-defined – sub-units, in keeping with successive divisions among male kin and varied patterns of productive activity, co-residence and sharing of economic resources. “It wasn't a joint family, everyone had gotten their partition. One house was doing this work, one house was doing that work (…) In this way, people cooked and ate separately. The income is separated, and the loss too.” As Siraj helped me draw his family tree, what came to light was a series of processes of association and dissociation rather than the linear story of a single unit. Siraj's story starts with his uncle Sukalu, and his tea cup making business. But as we went backwards, to the earliest generations Siraj could remember, he recalled that Mangal Prajapati, the youngest one among his “three grand-fathers” also went to Howrah, where he was keeping cows and selling their milk. Similarly, each generation had its share of diversification. Siraj's father – who died shortly after his birth – worked in a jute mill while his elder brother was employed for a time in an engineering company. A cousin found work in the Berger Paint factory, a job that has to this day been passed on from one generation to the next within that line. Sukalu's son, on the other hand, was sent to study in the nearby engineering college in Howrah. Following a rather successful carrier, he has now settled in Allahabad and has little if any contacts with the village.

Mohan Lal's narrative builds on an overlapping spatial and occupational polarity, opposing the village and its outside. Away from the village, he was trained and successfully worked as a mistri, and he constantly managed to secure some form of employment everywhere he went. The village, on the other hand, constitutes the space where he tried – and failed – to enter a different line of occupation, whether in a flour mill (which broke down) or in the distribution of ration goods (which he disliked). The failure of these ventures not only drove him away but also contributed to mark the village as inhospitable. His estrangement from his family, and an aversion to the ascribed relations rooted in the village, stand opposed to the connections which he himself built, essentially through his professional activity. For, as he would repeatedly say, “a friend, if you consider him a brother, is better than a brother. But if you can't consider your brother your own, then how can you call him a brother at all?”

Rather than a clear-cut break, however, the history of his village and family ties is constituted of a succession of ruptures and reworkings. It all started with the death of his own father in the 1950s

Mohan remembered coming back occasionally to the village as a child, accompanied by a co-villager who was employed in Bengal. The connection was subsequently re-established following his marriage, and his getting a position in the paper mill, though he hinted that this rekindling happened out of interest from his relatives. In this way, he stressed the enhanced status that his position as a man “in service” carried, but he also contrasted a situation in which he had been vulnerable and dependent on others to one when he had become economically and professionally successful and independent.

By the mid 1970s – he remembered that his daughter was in class five – his wife and children had settled in the village. He explained this shift as a way to save on expenditures, by living in one's own home rather than having to pay rent in the city. Shortly after moving back to the village his daughter fell sick while he was away in Bengal. The lack of support from the extended family during this crisis constituted another turning point in their relations. “When they didn't take care of my daughter… then I felt that these people do not have a right frame of mind. It does no good to live with them (…) Better to care for yourself and let them be.” The idea of partition (bantwara) does not appear, as with Siraj, as a clear cut “separation of income and loss”, but rather as a series of breaks, mostly grounded in the emotional sphere, as tensions erupted around the difficult sharing of common space and resources. He and his mother were rendered “useless” (bekar) by the death of his father, implying that they had become an economic burden on the rest of the family. Mohan repeatedly linked subsequent tensions to their “jealousy” (jalan) towards his success, and it is interesting to notice that the second break happened right after his wife and children settled back in the village. Frictions likely erupted over the sharing of domestic space and of the little land owned by the family, as well as over the repartition of income, especially that which Mohan would have sent from Bengal.

Though both families were split between rural and urban settlements, the structure of Mohan's family is markedly different from Siraj's. In the latter's bilocal household, the entire family unit was moving back and forth between the two poles, and the structure of the family, over time and space, was determined by its male members – who initiated the move, launched the tea-cup making business, and commanded over the movement and activity of other members (younger men and women). In Mohan's case, however, women structure the space he inhabits. His initial move to Bengal was initiated by his mother, as she found herself isolated following the death of her husband. This is a rather uncommon case. Women, though mobile, are rarely pictured as moving alone, and usually accompany their male kin. Mohan's wife, on the other hand, appears in many ways as an extension of Mohan himself. The inevitable interlocutor to his deliberations, she is a constant – albeit sometimes implicit – presence. She – as Siraj's wife – described her life in Howrah as centred on household chores: preparing food and caring for the children. After returning to the village, she oversaw cultivation, and tended to their cow. She was instrumental in supporting Mohan's claim to the different spaces he inhabited, both socially and physically. In Bengal, he likes to recall that their Bengali neighbours had a special fondness for this “Hindustani Bahu (daughter in law)”, her assimilation in the neighbourhood thus matching his professional integration. On the other hand, her settlement in the village some years into their marriage allowed him to reclaim his position – emotional and physical – within the rural household. However, despite their importance in processes of production and reproduction and as intellectual and emotional companions, women's roles are played down in both Siraj's and Mohan's narratives and their presence made implicit, if not invisible.

Naukri and dhandha: exploring the worlds of work

Both Siraj and Mohan drew on the idea of permanence in their narratives, but their understanding of what permanence means is markedly different. Commenting on his uncle Sukalu's trajectory, Siraj explained “This is what these people used to do. Take his case, he went to Assam, he didn't like it there, he couldn't get any income, so let's go to Calcutta. As long as you don't get permanent somewhere, you keep moving around.” For Siraj, permanence is something that was acquired before his own mobility and is understood in spatial terms, as a state of settlement, contrasted with constant displacement. For Mohan, on the other hand, permanence refers to work rather than to location, as the search for a “permanent” position led him from one place to the next. In his narrative “permanent” is not meant to express durability, but rather regularity. The term echoes the distinction, found in many Indian factories, between “temporary” and “permanent” employment, separated not by length of service but rather regularity of work. While “permanent” workers are guaranteed continuous work, the employment of the temporary worker is dependent on daily vacancies in the factory. Workers could remain “temporary” for years, if not for their entire working life while, in a context of industrial decline and closure, “permanent” positions, such as that occupied by Mohan, were terminated with the factory itself.

Throughout his working life, Mohan Lal navigated between different positions, always negotiating the inherent instability of work. He repeatedly distinguished between different forms of employment – especially between naukri and other forms (which he referred to as dhandha (trade, calling) or private work). These distinctions are made clear every time he is to arbitrate between different positions. Thus, when he was about to get a contract to work on a construction site in Calcutta, and the question arose of whether he should take up a position of mistri in the Titagarh Paper Mill, the stakes were expressed clearly by his wife who urged him to take the naukri offered by her father, for “how much can you trust private work?” He developed this opposition further:

The opposition between private work and naukri is interesting. Naukri, coming from naukar (servant) is a notoriously pliable term. In the late 19^th century, the British linguist George Grierson noted that naukar meant “a servant paid in cash by the year.”Footnote ³⁶ It could encompass anything from domestic service to service of the state, employment in the army to employment in large factories.Footnote ³⁷ Mohan, on the other hand, uses the term naukri specifically to refer to his employment in the paper mill, and contrasts it with his dhandha or private work, which referred to his employment on successive construction projects, either by taking a contract himself, or by working under the supervision of a contractor. The defining characteristic of naukri, in Mohan's narrative, appears to be its stability, as the inbuilt unpredictability of private work, where employment ends with every project, is contrasted with the regularity of factory service. Mohan draws on an understanding of freedom and restraint that runs contrary to the valorisation of “independent” work implicit in the concept of self-employment. In Mohan's parlance, the worker employed in a factory is freed from the necessity of securing his own employment, while the constant need to look for work, and the anxiety of not finding any weighs on him as a constraint. Mohan was, therefore, deeply disappointed to find out that his position in the paper mill was initially only “temporary”, for it meant that he would only work for limited periods and had to “sit” the rest of the time. This forced him to again look for work “outside”, on private construction sites in the area. It is only when he was finally made “permanent” in the factory that he left the realm of private work. He would, however, have to return to it later on, both at time of strikes, and after the lockout and eventual closure of the paper mill put an early end to his “permanent” naukri.

Back in the village, he tried another form of dhandha, based on capital rather than skill, in the shape of a flour mill. Its failure forced him to return to his old calling, as a mistri. As he eventually found his way to Noida, where he was employed by a private contractor (thikedar), the question of the type of employment he should favour came up once more

His claim that he found “permanent work” in the private sector forms a striking contrast with his misgivings about thirty-five year earlier, which led him to favour naukri in the paper mill over a private work deemed unreliable. In this conversation, however, the very idea of naukri has disappeared as a plausible alternative. The contrast is rather between two kinds of private work: in the village, for the local landed elite, or in the city, with his thikedar. There are different reasons why he might have felt wary of taking up the offer to work in the village. Most obvious is the fact that this was a single construction project, and that there was no thikedar to guarantee further employment. It also meant refusing the patronage of a Thakur, a member of the dominant and landed Rajput caste. It further builds on a division between the village and its outside that runs deep in Mohan Lal's narrative: employment relations, as a mistri, occur outside, while the village is a space of (failed) independent ventures (flour mill, ration distribution).

Of tradition and self-making: caste, identity and occupation

While there is no direct equivalence between caste and occupation, the question of work cannot be dissociated from the idea of “traditional caste trade”, and more generally from caste identity. Siraj described his trajectory as one of perfect congruence between caste and occupation both in the village and the city. Nothing of the sort for Mohan. His identity, as a mistri, far from being naturally linked to his caste origin, stood in contrast to it – or rather, in his narrative, replaced it. The different ways both men relate to their occupation appear starkly in their recollection of their training. For Siraj, this was a very incremental process, a collective teaching endeavour by the different members of his family, something that was natural and did not require a specific explanation

In Mohan's case, on the other hand, learning a craft was a remarkable event. He remembered meeting the man he always referred to as his guru in 1958 when he was living in Durgapur. His training did not come naturally to him. He was selected for it.

His natural dispositions, and the skills he comes to acquire then become the basis of his identity and status. While the fact of belonging to a specific community and family is central to the way Siraj narrates his life story, Mohan rarely alludes to caste, whether his own, or that of people around him. It only upon my eventually asking that he mentioned that his guru was from “a good caste, upper caste. They call it Kayasth.”

As a Kumhar Siraj belongs to a caste associated with pot-making. This does not mean that all Kumhars were potters, as most would also, if not solely, work in agriculture.Footnote ³⁸ Moreover, even if the nature of work remained similar as it was carried over to Bengal, changes in the content and techniques of production occurred through both time and space. The bulk of the production of village potters traditionally consisted in cooking pots and large containers. In Calcutta, however, they specialised in making tea cups, an activity that they subsequently brought back to the village.Footnote ³⁹ This, however, raises the question of what makes for continuity in their occupation. In this respect, the expression used by Siraj to refer to his own work – mitti ka kaam (work with the earth), a structure that is used for other occupations as well (lohe ka kaam (iron), lakri ka kaam (wood)), might offer some insight. Amidst changes in market, products and techniques, the material remains.

In Siraj's narrative his “traditional” identity as a potter is presented as a valuable resource, leading to economic success. As Siraj liked to stress, his uncle Sukalu tried his hand at various jobs – from wood cutter to postman – before realising that his own “traditional” skill was the most profitable of all. Similarly, his elder brother left his employment at the Guest Keen Williams engineering firm when he realised that it was more poorly remunerated: “So he said, I told the boss that I won't do it anymore, there is no money here. I am getting 8 annas, and if I do my house's work, I'll get 50–60 Rupees a day.” Siraj elaborated: “If you are a craftman, if you know some craft (kala), then your hands have a price (haath ka dam).” This stress on the “price” of the potters’ hand is all the more interesting as the economic and social status of potters in rural areas was rather low. In the late 19^th century the north Indian potter was described as a “true village menial, receiving customary dues in exchange for which he supplies all earthen vessels needed for household use.”Footnote ⁴⁰ In Siraj's narrative, on the other hand, not only is the potter's traditional identity adapted to urban labour markets, it is also more valuable than other types of work (especially factory labour), and becomes the basis for the successful establishment of the family, both in the village and the city. This allows Siraj to read his and his community's history as that of skilled craftsmen straddling urban and rural spaces, rather than as “village menials” and marginal agriculturalists. Moreover, it is precisely at a time when their “traditional” craft is declining that Siraj's narrative endeavours to reclaim its value and the value of the identity that is linked to it.

Once, a man came looking for Mohan in Howrah. People in the neighbourhood asked the newcomer where the man he sought was from. “Ghazipur” came the answer. As they couldn't guess whom he meant, they asked him where he worked. “The Titagarh Paper Mill”, the man said. As this still wasn't enough, they asked for the man's occupation. When, finally, he mentioned that the man was a mistri, people pointed him to Mohan's house. Through this anecdote, Mohan established the primacy of the identity he had built for himself, a skilled craftsman, a mistri. For lower caste labourers such as Mohan, the entanglement of occupation and caste identity usually constitutes a source of stigma, as the completion of certain tasks – in the case of Chamars, the removal of the carcass of dead animals and their skinning – marks them as ritually impure. To quote V. Geetha's striking formulation, the “untouchable body” constitutes “a distinctive labouring body, whose work, unlike the work of the peasant and the artisan, does not secrete either material or symbolic value. For, according to the stunningly circular logic of the caste order, the untouchable's labour, her vocation, by simply being of her body and being, is doomed to irrelevance.”Footnote ⁴¹

Mohan, however, claims value for his work. This is not expressed by highlighting wages and earnings, as in Siraj's case. The value that he claims is, rather, symbolic. While he never referred in much detail to the paid construction work that he did, he recalled with a sense of pride that he had helped to renovate the run-down Shiv Narayan temple in his neighbourhood in Kankinara, and that he had built his own house in the village, thus stressing his contribution to his community as well as his ability to secure a decent living space for himself and his family. Though he was proud to be a skilled craftsman, his skill per se was secondary, and his becoming a mistri primarily meant acquiring a new status, and a new identity. Work, in Mohan's narrative, is thus more about transforming the self than about producing material value.

“Carry your Self to such heights so that before deciding your fate God will ascertain from you: tell me, what is your wish.” What Mohan quoted as an “Urdu adage” was in fact a poem in which Muhammad Iqbal extolled his theological vision of the self.Footnote ⁴² Mohan's interpretation, on the other hand, shifted the terrain from the divine to the material world of labour. For him hard work (parishram) is what allows the elevation and transformation of the self. The idea of defying fate indeed holds special resonance for someone whose destiny – through the chance of birth – is bound to a stigmatised status. If work constitute the means of self-making, not all work has the power to elevate. The materiality of labour mattered more than professional status, and Mohan distinguished, even within the category of naukri, between demeaning and dignified forms of work. He thus refused the first position his father-in-law tried to secure for him in the Titagarh Paper Mill:

Mohan's qualms about the job he was offered was not framed in terms of insufficient wage and did not immediately refer to skill. Rather, he objected to its association with waste, and a use of the body which he judged especially demeaning.

The identity Mohan claims for himself is built through a series of interactions, and his narrative is constituted of the tale of several encounters and conversations. His image of self only appears in his relation to others, through a dual process of validation by those above him, and distinction from those below. The recognition of his status as a skilled craftsman is dependent on outside appreciation – by his guru, other mistris, the manager of the mill and the different contractors he worked with. His guru “loved (him) like a son”, while all of his subsequent employers would value him so that they would not let him work with anyone else. The eagerness of the thikedar to “bind” him by paying him an advance refers to the well-studied need, for labour contractors, to ensure the stability of their workforce. In Mohan's narrative, however, the exclusivity of the relationship also serves to highlight his value as a skilled worker. Much in the same way as his guru appreciated his alacrity, his successive employers recognised his quality as a worker and a man. “Each person's nature is different. He (his thikedar in Nodia) liked my character. So he said, please stay with me continuously.” The importance of these interactions stems from Mohan's material position. As an isolated mistri, he has to rely on the patronage of others to acquire skills and get employment. These are also the connections he chose to emphasise above all else. Though his own (inherited) network did play an important role in helping him secure employment, this is consistently downplayed in his narrative.

The importance of such interactions in Mohan's construction of himself as a mistri creates a dual impression: while he conceives of his trajectory as a dissociation from inherited networks, his identity does not fully belong to him. Here, it is interesting to compare Mohan's narrative to Tulsi Ram's published account of growing up a Chamar boy in the 1950s. Tulsi Ram's narrative is, much like Mohan's, full of interactions. But, whereas in Mohan's case these are benign, and serve to confirm the identity he claims for himself, in Tulsi Ram's they are invariably negative, constantly reminding the young boy and brilliant student of the stigmatized identity he does not accept. What is interesting is that whether positive or negative, interactions with others – invariably figures of authority, whether due to age, profession or ritual hierarchy – hold the key to the reality of the self. The identity that one claims, or even feels is not enough. What counts, ultimately, is what others perceive – a state described by V. Geetha as one of “permanent dissociation.”Footnote ⁴³

The importance of interactions appears strongly in another anecdote narrated by Mohan, the only part of his narrative which deals openly with the question of caste

As I asked him what he made out of this incident, he explained further

His longstanding vegetarianism thus served both to distinguish him from other Dalits, as well as to put him on an equal footing with the Thakur.Footnote ⁴⁴ Mohan carefully distances himself from experiences of stigmatisation and humiliation, which are central to the creation of a sense of Dalit-ness in Tulsi Ram's autobiography. Stigmatisation is not absent, but it is situated elsewhere, on some other Dalit. The deep-rooted ambiguity characteristic of Mohan's relation to caste and Brahmanical norms pervades the history of many lower caste reform movements such as the Shiv Narayan Panth, of which he was a member.Footnote ⁴⁵ At different points in our conversations, Mohan rejected and ridiculed certain forms of Brahmanical ideologies, as well as the domination – whether symbolical or material – of the higher castes in the village. He never openly portrayed himself in a relation of employment and dependence to the dominant Rajput community. Here it is interesting to consider the missing twelve years in Mohan's narrative, between his return to the village and departure to Noida. While he would repeatedly refer to the failed venture of the flour mill, he remained rather vague regarding the other activities he performed, eventually mentioning once that he had “built some houses around here.” Conversely, he recounted with much detail his refusal to work for a local Thakur. He also took obvious pleasure in recalling how, for a while, his flour mill successfully competed with that run by a Thakur. Yet, in keeping with Brahmanical norms of purity and pollution, he drew on his long-standing vegetarianism to set himself apart from other Dalits, a distinction that could only be arbitrated by the higher caste Rajputs who shared their plate with him. Mohan shed all possible markers of stigma, not only by stressing his independence, as a mistri working away from the village, but also by recalling how he refused demeaning work, and by associating himself with more “respectable” eating habits. In doing so, he distinguished himself from those below him, whether Dalits, or labourers. While his identity stands confirmed only through the respect others give him, Mohan's narrative summons multiple sources of validation: the village Thakurs, his guru, various thikedars and fellow mistris all serve to establish his distinctive identity. Mobility thus provides the opportunity to diversify sources of endorsement from above, and a certain degree of choice, breaking his dependency, both material and moral, on the local upper-castes.

Conclusion: The “men from over here”, over there. Of spatial (dis)continuity and segmented histories

Weaving together the narratives of Siraj Prajapati and Mohan Lal allows us to bring out certain tensions which characterise the making of these life stories over time and space. Both narratives show mobility to be more than a simple change of place, as it opened a field of contradictory possibilities. Distance allowed Mohan a certain liberty to re-fashion his identity as a mistri. Siraj, on the other hand, by drawing an uninterrupted line between village potters and urban tea cup makers, re-cast the history of his community as one of skilled craftsmen, rather than “village menials”, landless agriculturalists or marginal landowners. While Mohan stressed the identity he built for himself, away from ascribed networks and identities, a constant need for validation contrasts with Siraj's ability to claim his occupation as a birth right. The two narratives show that movement between the village and its outside revolved around a set of tensions between rupture and continuity, but also between integration and compartmentalisation, homogeneity and diversification. Occupation and identity, country and city, self, family and community are brought together as a single, integrated whole in Siraj's story. Mohan, on the other hand, keeps these competing categories separate. Contrary to Tulsi Ram's narrative, Mohan's story does not frame mobility as a radical rupture. Spatial displacement provides for diversification rather than emancipation, and thereby constitutes a source of self-realisation. Village Thakurs may still be the ultimate judge of his ritual purity, but the quality of Mohan's craftsmanship and the value of his character (bhav subhav) are validated by others, his guru and thikedars, and the fellow mistris he associated with. This compartmentalisation of different social, mental and spatial segments is what gives Mohan power over his own trajectory. Though his father-in-law helped secure him a job in the Titagarh Paper Mill, and though he was occasionally employed by the dominant Thakurs in the village, the extent to which he reproduced inherited relations – of solidarity or exploitation – is glossed over or downplayed. Failures are part of his story, but they are contained within the realm of the village and the family, ascribed identities and sociability. His trajectory, as a mistri, is kept independent from caste, community or family, and constituted as the realm of self-building and realisation.

Siraj and Mohan differ in their activity and in the form of their mobility, in the types of status they value, in their trajectories and, more fundamentally, in the way they narrate it all. The serial mobility of the relatively isolated mistri offers a sharp contrast with the back and forth between two stable locations of the family-based petty commodity producer. Both harbour rather contrary positions with respect to work, as Mohan favoured the regularity of naukri while Siraj valued the profitability of independent artisanal activity. The segmentation of the labour market and of occupational and social networks, of prospects and trajectories, however, does not preclude commonalities and fluidities. Despite Siraj's apparent dislike for factory employment, other members of his family did indeed choose to work in large scale industries. From the 1980s onwards, the sharp decline of employment in the formal industrial sector meant that independent activity (dhandha) of different kinds would become pervasive. Though Mohan Lal valued naukri for its stability, private work eventually proved the more permanent option, supplementing unstable factory employment, and eventually replacing it. Siraj's hostility to naukri also needs to be located in a context where traditional hierarchies of occupation have been reversed. Tea-cup making, formerly a flourishing business, is quickly losing ground while the long derided naukri has become a prized – and almost inaccessible – position. Thus, bringing both narratives together does not simply serve to establish a contrast between the two men. Rather, each narrative can serve to reveal the other, in their very divergence. The trajectories of Mohan Lal and Siraj Prajapati are not simply a testimony to the diversity of the “people from UP and Bihar” settled in Bengal. Teasing out the tensions which traversed the life narratives of the two men allows for the exploration of the way the “people from over here”, the men and women from UP and Bihar, (un)settled in eastern India throughout the 20th century, developed as a segmented social group.