In the late nineteenth century, colonial authorities erected a blockade on the Sion Causeway, a major road linking Bombay and the suburb of Salsette. Police patrolled the entrance, controlling the flows of migrants who sought refuge from the ever-present threat of famine in the city’s hinterlands. On a single day in 1877, 546 men, women, and children, many emaciated, arrived at the blockade; only twelve were deemed healthy enough to work and allowed into Bombay. - “Were We Not Promised To Be Free?” https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/were-we-not-promised-to-be-free/ Divya Subramanian ▪ Spring 2021
The pandemic has revealed how the rapid urbanization fueling India’s economic ascent is rooted in migrant labor. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/were-we-not-promised-to-be-free/
Images of migrant workers trekking home defined India’s coronavirus response. The government instated the lockdown order on March 24 with only four hours’ notice. To avoid starvation in the cities, hundreds of thousands of migrants packed up and left. Railways were closed, so their only option was to walk in the punishing heat, carrying children and their possessions, their blue surgical masks often the only new item of clothing they wore. While repatriation flights were chartered for migrants abroad, including some of the 8.5 million Indian workers in the Persian Gulf, it took more than a month to set up special rail services for domestic migrant workers, and many were charged full-price fares—a cruel joke to those who had already exhausted their savings to survive. When the villagers reached home, they faced harassment as potential carriers of disease as well as a stagnant rural economy, with the promise of relief work under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act curtailed by the lockdown.
In Making the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay, Sheetal Chhabria argues that urbanization in late colonial India relied on a series of exclusions that elided the role of migrant labor in the production of the colonial city. Radhika Singha’s The Coolie’s Great War: Indian Labour in a Global Conflict, 1914–1921 looks back to the early twentieth century to show how vulnerable wartime workers mobilized to demand their share of benefits.
Migrants who did find a place in the city were pushed to its fringes, where they packed into one-room shanties and crowded tenements. In Making the Modern Slum, Chhabria shows how from the 1860s onward, colonial authorities brought about the conceptual transformation of shelter into housing—an administrative shift that allowed them to distinguish between desirable and undesirable populations by consigning non-economic forms of shelter, which didn’t produce tax or rent income, to the category of the slum. This transformation coincided with the need to extract greater revenues from housing; the “house tax” represented a significant source of municipal income.