Jugaad and informality as drivers of India's cow slaughter economy

South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2019

This article explores the spatial politics of situating slaughterhouses at the margins of Mumbai city enacted by the sanitary civic state and the caste labour of the butcher community. While the sanitary state mobilises colonial discourses of sanitation that deem animal slaughter unhygienic and so needing to be located at the shifting periphery of the city, an ethnography of the Muslim sub-castes of mutton and beef butchers suggests that animal slaughter is a form of caste labour that involves cultivating hereditary skills of working with flesh, bone and blood, which the Mumbai butchers refer to as 'karigari' (artisanship). Their caste labour is resisting the reconfiguration of the meat trade, which they view as fragmenting the community's control over their labour. By bringing theories of urban space, state and caste among urban Muslims into the conversation, the article describes the ways in which scientific and communal ideas of sanitation are consolidated along a continuum. It also describes the ways in which caste and religion condense along an axis to form analogous structures that are deployed by the beef and mutton butchers to resist these spatial shifts.

Democracy, Religious Pluralism and the Liberal …, 2011

Journal of Peasant Studies, 2019

Ethnography in Gujarat, India's poster-state of market reforms, recovers what transpires when the individual embraces capital for market-driven production. This article reports on resource-poor rural households who embark on dairying through buffaloes acquired with microcredit. The essay discusses the politics of economic value pertaining to gender, labor and natural resources; and economic value encountering other values, lifeworlds and affective relations related to work, humans and non-human others. These phenomena interrupt commodity production. Human-animal relations challenge both capitalism's treatment of bovines as machines, and the bovine politics of Hindu nationalism rooted in ignorance of rural economy, lifeworlds and livelihoods.

2015

Criminal Capital explores the relationship between neoliberalism, criminality and the reshaping of class in modern India. It discusses how the political vocabularies of urban industrial workers reflect the processes by which power is distributed across the region. Based upon field research among a ‘casualised’ workforce in the industrial city of Jamshedpur, the book examines the links between the decline of employment security, and criminality in trade unions, corporations and the state. The volume compares popular discourses of corruption against the ethnography of local labour politics, business enterprise and debt collection, and shows how corruption and criminality consolidate class power in industrial environments. Using an interdisciplinary ethnographic approach, this study explores the relationship between capitalism, corruption, violence and labour politics in contemporary Indian society. An important intervention in the study of Indian political economy, this work will be of interest to scholars and researchers of Indian politics, social anthropology, economics, labour relations and criminology. 'Criminal Capital' in the Media: https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-0bf6-The-neoliberal-march-to-casualise-the-workforce#.WKRFs2dviUl

2015

This chapter presents an ethnographic account of a firm of debt collectors in the Indian steel town of Jamshedpur, through which I discuss how successful entrepreneurship relies upon cooperation between criminal, corporate and state actors. I argue that rather than operating at the fringes of capitalist democracies, criminality is integral to the economic and political processes by which power and wealth change hands in parts of India. Second, I consider what the implications of this model are for anthropological understandings of Indian corruption, since organised criminal entrepreneurship necessarily engages with abuses of institutional authority. I suggest that since anthropological approaches to India largely focus upon public discourses surrounding petty bribery, they are inappropriate conceptual tools with which to analyse systematic and violent forms of elite criminal enterprise. Inspired Volkov´s study of Russian organised crime, I argue that a model of `criminal entrepreneurship´ provides a more solid conceptual basis which to understand the political economy of corruption in India.

Global Labour Journal, 2009

This essay explores theoretical and practical problems arising from the impact of liberalization/globalization and its latest crisis on India's informal economy-heavily populated by petty commodity producers (PCP) and petty traders. Its theoretical focus is the distinction between PCP and 'labour' more generally because it is now common practice theoretically to elide the two kinds of work. Reviewing field material it focuses on two aspects of India's informal economy-the persistence of small firms and their regulation by social institutions rather than by the state. These social institutions express identity as well as class. Its practical concerns are on the impact of globalization on PCP and labour in global value chains and the effects of the financial crisis on PCP in India's informal economy.

Cultural Anthropology, 2020

This article resituates the study of time in anthropology, moving it from the comparative exploration of internally coherent religions and national territories to the very margins of religions, nations, and capital. Borders recalibrate time by imbuing mundane economic activities with political salience. Dangerous border crossings make temporal registers contingent and erratic, and generative of violence and torture. I show how India’s prohibitions on live cattle exports and Bangladesh’s demand for beef compel acts that effectively legalize animal smuggling, which, nonetheless, remains a risky business. Across the riverine islands of the India-Bangladesh borderlands, smallscale traders and transporters operate according to the distinct logics of militarized infrastructures and legal regimes that generate moments of “signal clear,” marking the temporary opening of border passages and opportunities for sustenance, as well as “armed” times, more sustained periods of heightened national security, and imminent violence. By subjecting the border’s productive and coercive temporal energies to close ethnographic scrutiny, I suggest that cattle’s sacrality reinforces the material world of capital and strife, ruptures kinship ties, and subjects Muslim cattle workers and their families to prolonged periods of scarcity and hunger. This article shows how people’s experiences of the borderland as a space are vitally shaped by fractured, shifting, and contingent rhythms of time. [borders; time; value; cow smuggling; violence; kinship; gender; Assam; India-Bangladesh border]

South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2019

This introduction outlines how the essays in this special section contribute to scholarship on cow protection in India. It argues that they disrupt three powerful framing binaries-religion/economy, legality/illegality and cow-lover/cow-killer-that have tended to dominate the literature on cow protection. Making tangible the analytical limits of these categories, the essays find new critical leverage in the everyday situated relationships between humans, bovines and the state. The essays are distinguished by their attention to bovines as creative and productive forces that are not mere symbols for human politics, but materially embodied and agentive beings that play a significant role in shaping the social and political worlds which emerge around them.

In the Tata company town of Jamshedpur, incisive popular discourses of corruption posit a mutually beneficial relationship between ‘legitimate’ institutions and organised criminality; a dynamic believed to enable pervasive transformations in the city’s industrial and financial infrastructures. This article situates this local discourse within the wider body of anthropological work on South Asian corruption, noting a discursive departure from the hegemonic, personalised and essentially provincialising corruption models encountered by many researchers. The article interrogates the popular model of crime and corruption in Jamshedpur through a focus upon the business practices of local violent entrepreneurs, exploring the extent to which their negotiations with corrupt institutions and ‘legitimate’ capital may indeed inform their successes. Drawing analytic cues from material on organised crime in the former USSR, this article identifies a mutually beneficial relationship between political influence, violence and industrial capital in an Indian company town.