World-Class Aspirations and Everyday Realities:Understanding Survival, Politics and Resistance of Street Vendors in Kolkata, West Bengal

Abstract

Street vendors constitute a defining component in most cities of the South, and India is no exception. However, with many Indian cities being framed as the main drivers of the nation’s economy, there has been a growing intolerance towards their presence in public spaces. Street vendors, popularly known as ‘hawkers’ in South Asia, are threatened, dispossessed, and evicted as they are perceived to be illegitimate, hazardous and antithetical to the making of a ‘world-class city.’ While the state favors privatized and sanitized spaces that reflect bourgeois aesthetics, street vending sites tend to be viewed as embarrassing and undesirable in the contemporary urban environment. Fueled by the urban fears of ‘congestion’ and ‘pollution,’ routine crackdowns and extensive cleanup drives have become the norm in Kolkata. At a time when ‘cleaning’ has turned into ‘cleansing,’ such exclusionary visions have left urban informal actors with contestations, resistance, and political mobilization as the only emancipatory weapons. Through ethnographic interviews with street vendors and hawker organizations in Kolkata, where my work is empirically positioned, this study explores how street vending, commonly thought to be a marginalizing practice, formatively proliferates through powerfully shaped strategies of politics and governmentality. The empirical evidence reveals that hawkers are not passive victims; rather, they employ creative strategies to bypass the state and ensure their survival.