Uncovering a politics of livelihoods: analysing displacement and contention in contemporary India

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we use livelihoods as an organizing concept which brings together questions of production, social reproduction, and the conditions for these, to describe and reflect upon three ‘moments’ of displacement and contention in India. Our first moment, a massive flash strike by workers in the export garments industry in Bangalore, is located in the present neo-liberal context of jobless growth, increasingly unregulated and precarious forms of employment, and market-based forms of service provision. Our second moment concerns popular struggles in defence of the commons in settled rural fishing communities in south India, and the third, the tenacious efforts of pavement dwellers in Bombay to make place, the political condition for production and social reproduction. The originary context for these last two moments was the state-led, technology-driven, capitalist modernization of agriculture and fisheries of the early post-‘independence’ decades, tied to projects of state-building, self-reliance, and sovereignty. The three moments chart the long history of processes of precarization under postcolonial capitalism but, equally, a constant politics of livelihood, grounded in claims to rights earned through labour, and addressing itself to both state and capital as complicit in structuring access to livelihoods under capitalism.