People of the ‘Unruly’ City: Kolkata’s Hawker Movement, the State and the Politics of Livelihood : Part-2
Introductory note
Part I traced the social history of Kolkata’s hawker economy — refugee settlements, public spaces, informal work, law, and the political language of the movement. Part II picks up that thread and turns to the railway economy, evictions and rehabilitation, state and political control, and the larger question running through the piece: who has a right to the city?
The railway line is an economic world too
You can see the same pattern of social relationships in the lives of hawkers at railway stations and on platforms.
The railway is not only a place where trains run.
A vast economy grows around it.
A passenger buys something from the same hawker every day.
Someone about to board a train leaves something with a hawker for another person.
Someone says, “Give that to so-and-so when you see him.”
The hawker knows who needs what.
Sometimes payment is made later.
Sometimes the transaction rests entirely on familiarity.
This is not simply a market.
It is an economy of social trust.
There is something distinctive about these relationships. There is no bank here. No credit card. No written contract. But there is trust.
When the state sees this arrangement only as ‘unauthorised vending’, none of that social economy comes into view.
If the railway evicts the hawkers, an area becomes administratively clear.
But what happens to the social economy tied to that place?
That is the real question.
Bustee eviction is not only about demolishing houses
The same applies to bustee eviction.
A settlement is declared ‘illegal’.
People are evicted.
Then they are told that they will be rehabilitated.
But is rehabilitation only a room or a house?
Where will people work?
Where is the market?
Where is the school?
Where is the doctor?
Where are the people they know?
Where is the hawker from whom they bought their daily necessities?
Where is the rickshaw-puller they knew by sight and by name?
Where is the neighbour who would fetch a doctor when someone fell ill?
Experiences of rehabilitation such as Nonadanga teach us something important. Moving people from one place to another is not, by itself, rehabilitation.
People live within a social geography.
There is work.
There is a market.
There is a school.
There is healthcare.
There are relatives.
There are neighbours.
There are political relationships.
There are forms of social security.
Break that entire web and give someone only a room, and you have not rehabilitated a life. You have relocated a body.
Street schools, tuition and social life
This informal economy does not only create markets.
It creates society too.
Somewhere, tuition classes are held in the afternoon.
Children from the neighbourhood come to study.
Someone teaches them for very little money.
Somewhere else, a street school appears.
If someone falls ill, a neighbour finds a doctor.
If medicine is expensive, somebody helps.
None of these relationships appears in an official record.
But this is society.
We often imagine society as only what is represented by registered organisations.
In reality, society is made through everyday relationships.
One person stands beside another.
One person knows another.
One person lends to another.
One person helps another person’s child with schoolwork.
When someone falls ill, somebody else calls the doctor.
These informal institutions are not substitutes for the formal institutions of the state. Where the state does not reach, they hold people’s lives together.
When eviction destroys this social geography, it does not only destroy houses or stalls.
It destroys relationships.
So is the state always bad?
We need to be cautious here.
If we say that the state is simply bad and informality good, we make the problem appear far too easy.
Roads are needed for movement.
Pedestrians need safety.
Fire safety matters.
Public health matters.
Waste has to be managed.
Children, elderly people and people with disabilities have a right to move through the city.
A hawker has rights, but so does a pedestrian.
So the question is not as simple as: should hawkers stay or should hawkers go?
The question is: how do we create a city in which both sets of rights can coexist?
Part of a pavement can be kept open for pedestrians.
Hawkers can sit in particular places at particular times.
Waste can be managed.
Fire-safety rules can be made.
A minimum width for pedestrian movement can be guaranteed.
Area-based plans can be made with hawkers sitting at the table.
The problem is that we so often plan for hawkers after excluding hawkers.
The people whose lives are being planned are not invited to the planning table.
That has to change.
Kolkata today and the renewed fear of eviction
The question of hawker eviction has returned to Kolkata.
The railways have moved to evict hawkers from railway land. Notices and the threat of eviction have also appeared in different places on state-controlled land. Politically, there have been assurances that eviction will not take place before the Pujas. But what happens after the Pujas? That question has left many hawkers anxious.
So our question at this moment should not only be: how many hawkers will be removed?
We should ask: where will they go?
Where will they sell their goods?
Where will their customers go?
Where will the small producer who supplied them find a market?
Where will the worker who bought their wares at affordable prices buy from now?
What happens to the economic relationship between the hawker and the bustee nearby?
If a hawker is evicted from a railway station, what happens to the small economy around that station?
On paper, removing one hawker is an administrative decision.
In life, it affects many people.
That is why eviction is often not a solution to a problem.
It is a relocation of the problem.
The Trinamool years and informal control
The role of the Trinamool government in relation to hawker eviction cannot be reduced to a simple story either.
Hawkers have been evicted from different places during Trinamool’s rule. But for long stretches, this did not always appear as a single coherent, declared state policy. Instead, relationships between hawkers, the administration and political power were often worked out locally — through political control, money, permission to vend, informal arrangements and negotiation.
So, eviction on one side.
Permission to vend on the other.
Money here.
Local political mediation there.
A compromise somewhere else.
A notice.
A protest.
You have to understand the whole arrangement.
The informal economy may lie outside formal state rules, but it can also exist inside informal systems of political control.
Here the hawker is sometimes a victim of the state.
Sometimes dependent on local power.
Sometimes part of a political organisation.
Sometimes an activist.
Sometimes someone bargaining for a practical advantage.
Leave out this complexity and you cannot understand the actual history of the hawker movement.
‘The state is good’ — but whose state?
When I think about the role of the state, a phrase comes back to me: ‘the state is good.’
There is truth in that.
We need the state.
The state can provide education.
The state can provide healthcare.
The state can provide social security.
The state can provide safety.
The state can protect citizens’ rights.
The problem begins when the state changes from an institution that sustains human life into an administrator of property.
Then it begins to say:
This land is mine.
This pavement is mine.
This road is mine.
This park is mine.
This market is mine.
You may use it only with my permission.
But if state land exists for people, why should that land be managed by excluding the people who use it?
The state’s job is not to make people’s lives invisible.
Its job is to make those lives dignified.
Cities of the Global South and the European model
We often judge our cities through an image of a European city.
The roads are straight.
The pavements are empty.
Shops stand in designated places.
Housing is confined to designated zones.
Everything has documentation.
Working hours are fixed.
Life itself appears to run within an administrative grid.
But Kolkata has a different history.
Kolkata was made by refugees from Partition.
By people who came from villages.
By small producers.
By hawkers.
By bustee dwellers.
By rickshaw-pullers.
By small shopkeepers.
This ‘unruly’ life is itself part of Kolkata’s modernity.
So disorder here is not simply administrative failure.
It is a social reality.
In cities of the Global South, what is called irregularity is often another form of the rule itself.
People live outside the state’s rules because, in practical terms, that is how they can survive.
Judge this life only by the standards of a European city and you misunderstand the people of the city itself.
The politics of the non-citizen
This informal life can also make the state uncomfortable.
The state generally wants to classify people.
What is your name?
What is your address?
What is your occupation?
Where is your licence?
What is your date of birth?
Where are your papers?
Where are your tax records?
Where will you live?
At what time will you work?
Where will you vend?
But a person whose life cannot be neatly fit into these classifications becomes a problem for the state.
Sometimes these people are hawkers.
Sometimes bustee dwellers.
Sometimes pavement dwellers.
Sometimes small producers.
They have one thing in common.
They make their own lives.
And when that life becomes political, they join a protest march.
A person with no great political power walks in a procession of thousands.
A person whom society has in many ways rendered a ‘non-citizen’ stands in the front line of a movement.
That makes the state uncomfortable.
Because political power is not made only in Parliament or the legislative assembly.
Political power is also made in the everyday relationships between people.
Politics does not fall from the sky
Politics does not suddenly drop out of the sky.
A few people do not simply arrive with a microphone, say, ‘Come on, let’s do politics,’ and turn everybody political.
Politics has a social base.
It has an economic base.
There is a relationship between a hawker and a customer.
Between a hawker and a small producer.
Between a hawker and a rickshaw-puller.
Between a hawker and a bustee dweller.
Political consciousness can grow based on these relationships.
Today I am a hawker.
You live in a bustee.
That person pulls a rickshaw.
Another is a small producer.
Our occupations are different.
But the problems we face have something in common.
We all need public space.
We all need work.
We all need affordable markets.
We all need a right to remain in the city.
That recognition can serve as the basis for class politics.
The limits of the hawker movement
But the hawker movement has its limitations.
The informal economy is not always romantic.
There is muscle power.
There is extortion.
There are ties with local power.
There is bargaining with political parties.
Some people compromise with the administration.
Some organise and fight.
Some secure individual advantages.
Some are left behind.
There are divisions within organisations.
If we deny these realities, we will misunderstand the movement.
But it is equally wrong to cite these problems and declare the entire informal economy illegitimate.
The question of an organisation's weakness or corruption is not the same as the right to livelihood.
If a hawkers’ organisation is corrupt, it does not follow that a hawker has no right to earn a living.
If there is political intimidation in a bustee, it does not follow that the people living there are not citizens of the country.
The task of the state is to understand these complexities and build democratic arrangements around them.
Not eviction, but reorganisation
That is why eviction must be rejected as the only policy available to deal with hawkers.
That does not mean demanding that disorder be frozen forever.
What we need is better planning.
There can be hawker zones.
There can be agreed hours.
A clear width of space can be kept open for pedestrians.
Fire safety can be ensured.
Waste can be managed.
Hawkers can be registered.
There can be local hawker committees.
There can be specific arrangements for women hawkers.
There can be special provisions for elderly hawkers and those with disability.
Railway stations, bus depots and stands, markets and major roads may each need different plans.
But there is one condition more important than all the others.
You cannot plan for hawkers after excluding hawkers.
The person whose life is being planned has to sit at the planning table.
Nor is there any need to turn the pedestrian and the hawker into enemies.
Their rights have to be thought about together.
Who has a right to the city?
In the end, the question is very simple.
Whose road is it?
Whose pavement?
Whose park?
Whose market?
Whose city?
The state will say: the land belongs to the state.
The railways will say: railway land belongs to the railways.
The municipal corporation will say: municipal property belongs to the municipality.
The law may say exactly that.
But society asks a different question.
When people use a place, does no social right arise from that use?
Does the person who labours there every day have no claim at all?
Does a person who has made a life in that place across generations have no right to the city?
Does someone whose labour keeps the city’s economy going have no right to remain in its public spaces?
Legal ownership and social rights are not the same thing.
Law understands property.
Society understands use.
Law understands ownership.
People understand life.
The task of the state is to create a democratic balance between the two.
The city inside a pavement
Think of one pavement.
In the morning, someone sells vegetables there.
An office-goer walks past.
Someone buys vegetables.
A rickshaw-puller stops for tea.
A student buys an exercise book.
A woman picks something up before catching a train.
In the afternoon, a bookseller arrives.
Tea is sold in the evening.
At night, a worker sits there for a while and rests.
One small pavement.
But how many economic relationships fit inside it!
How many social relationships!
How many lives and stories!
Now the administration arrives and says, ‘This place has to be cleared.’
On paper, that is one line.
In reality, it strikes at many lives.
That difference is crucial.
There is a history inside Kolkata’s disorder
We tend to see a city only through the design of its roads.
But the real history of a city is written on the road itself.
Where a market comes up — that is a history.
Where refugees came and built a settlement — that is a history.
Where hawkers sell their wares — that is a history.
Where a rickshaw-puller sleeps at night — that too is a history.
Where a bustee emerged — that is a history.
Where small-scale production takes place — that is a history.
Where people buy affordable goods — that, too, has a history.
All these histories together make Kolkata.
So before we ‘put the city in order,’ we need to ask: what exactly are we putting in order?
People’s lives?
Or are we cleaning the city of the lives people actually live?
The real question of the hawker movement
If we call the hawker movement only a movement for livelihood, we see only half of it.
It is an economic movement because people are trying to protect their source of income.
It is a social movement because hawkers are tied to buyers, producers, bustee dwellers and rickshaw-pullers.
It is a citizens’ movement because it raises questions about people’s rights over public space.
It is a political movement because state rules and people's lives confront one another.
It is a cultural movement, too, because the right to the street includes the right to sing there, stage plays there, hold meetings there, sit and talk there.
So the hawker movement cannot be reduced to ‘the hawkers’ problem.’
It is a question about the city's character.
A question about whom the city is built for.
You cannot evict people from the city
You can evict a hawker.
You can clear a pavement.
You can smash a handcart.
You can shut down a market.
You can demolish a bustee.
You can drive people away from the settlements along a railway line.
But you cannot end the need to earn a living.
People have to work.
People have to buy and sell.
People have to live somewhere.
People have to build and maintain relationships.
If the state destroys one informal arrangement, people will make another.
Because life does not wait for rules.
Life makes a path of its own.
The city has to learn from its people
This is really where the problem lies.
We are used to looking at the city from above.
We see the city on a map.
We draw lines across roads.
We measure the width of pavements.
We look at land ownership.
We look at the law.
We look at documents.
But we do not look at the life inside the city.
We do not sit down and talk to a hawker.
We do not ask where a rickshaw-puller sleeps at night.
We do not ask where a bustee dweller buys necessities.
We do not ask whom a small producer sells to.
We do not ask why a woman has to buy vegetables from the pavement market on her way to the railway station.
If we fail to see these invisible relationships, an urban plan may look beautiful on paper.
In practice it may work against people’s lives.
The city therefore has to learn not only from planners, but from the people who live in it.
A final word: before we put the unruly city in order
In the end we return to the same question.
Whose city is it?
The state’s?
The municipal corporation’s?
The railways’?
The corporate houses’?
The large property owners’?
Or the people’s?
The answer perhaps is more complicated.
The city belongs to no one alone.
The city belongs to its people.
To the person who came here after Partition.
To the person who came from a village in search of work.
To the person who pulls a rickshaw.
To the person who sells fish on a pavement.
To the person who buys fish from the hawker on that pavement.
To the person who lives in a bustee.
To the person who stages plays in the street.
To the person who falls asleep in a corner of a park at night.
To the person who wakes in the morning and goes out again to work for the city.
It is possible to build a ‘beautiful city’ by excluding these lives.
The roads can be cleaned.
The pavements can be cleared.
The markets can be moved.
The bustees can be demolished.
The city may even look shinier.
But will it still be a city of its people?
You have to ask the hawker where he or she will sell his wares.
You have to ask the pedestrian how he or she will walk.
You have to ask the rickshaw-puller where he will wait for passengers.
You have to ask the bustee dweller what rehabilitation means to her.
You have to ask the small producer where his market is.
You have to ask the woman worker where she can work safely.
Without that conversation, urban planning becomes a rule over the city.
Making a city with people is not the same thing as imposing a city on people.
That is why today’s question of hawker eviction in Kolkata brings us back to an old question that remains unfinished.
Is the state for the people?
Or must people wait for permission to use the state’s property?
Is the pavement only for walking?
Yes, it is for walking.
But is there no room there for people’s livelihoods?
Is the road only for cars?
Is a park only to be used for a few prescribed hours of the day?
Is a railway station only for passengers?
Is the city only for people who have land papers?
Does the person whose labour keeps the city running every day have no right to the city?
There are no easy answers to these questions.
But if we do not ask them, the city's democracy remains incomplete.
Because urban democracy is not decided only at the ballot box.
It is also decided by who is allowed to stand where, who may sit where, who may work where, who may sleep where, who may sell his wares where, who may hold a meeting where, who may sing where — and, ultimately, who may be allowed to remain visible as part of the city.
The hawker movement is also a struggle for that visibility.
A hawker says, "I am here."
I am not outside this city.
My labour is part of this city’s economy.
My customers are people of this city.
My children are growing up in this city.
My livelihood is tied to this city.
You can make the city look prettier by removing me. But you cannot change the city's reality by making me invisible.
That may be the most important point of all.
You cannot evict people from the city.
You can move them from one place.
You can raze a market.
You can clear a pavement.
But you cannot erase people’s needs, their labour, their markets and their social relationships.
Life will make space for itself somewhere else.
A market will appear beside another pavement.
Tea will be sold beside another railway line.
A small shop will appear beside another bustee.
Someone will again look for the hawker he knows.
A seller will again wait for an old customer.
Because a city is not only bricks, concrete, roads and titles to land.
A city is a name for relationships between people.
Photo: Kushal Kar