Hawker

Hutom had seen them on the streets of Shobhabazar: women fish-sellers, the mechunis, carrying lamps at night as they sold salted hilsa. Spotting a customer, they would call out, “O gamcha-kandhe, bhalo mach nibi? O khengra gupo minse, chaar anaa dibi!” Would it really be wrong to call those mechunis of old Kolkata hawkers?

They appear in Mahendranath Dutta’s recollections of the old city and in Radhaprasad Gupta’s writings. Here a doi-wala, there a sabun-wala; a seller of conch bangles and vermilion, a tray of food, a tiny roadside stall, or someone carrying everyday necessities from neighbourhood to neighbourhood. A city alive with countless occupations, cries and forms of exchange. Kallolini Tilottama, the ever-flowing city.

Kolkata’s streets, markets, neighbourhoods, and the “inside and outside” of its railway stations were never without hawkers. At every turn in the making of this metropolis, they were there. It is impossible to imagine the city without them.

And yet, today they are called “illegal encroachers”. Apparently, they are why pavements cannot be walked. So, in the dead of night, bulldozers arrive. Stalls are demolished, the city made “encroachment-free”, “clean” and “orderly” in the name of development.

But are development and hawkers natural enemies? Are pavements and hawkers incompatible? Surely, they were never meant to be.

In Hutom’s Kolkata, the streets belonged to everyone: Brahmins, babus, mechunis, opium-eaters and beggars. The street did not discriminate. It brought together buyers, sellers and passers-by. The city does not discriminate; power does. It makes the rules, declares what is legal or illegal, and sends bulldozers to erase whatever falls outside them.

What happens to livelihoods, to generations of shared urban life? What became of the law meant to protect hawkers? Can their resistance find a political language?

Our special issue is about all these questions.

By Shubhendu Dasgupta

People of the 'Unruly' City: Kolkata’s Hawker Movement, the State and the Politics of Livelihood : Part-1

This city is made as much by its pavements, open grounds, bustees, settlements beside railway lines, temporary markets, tea stalls, rickshaws, handcarts and the livelihoods of ordinary people as it is by its planned roads, flyovers, markets, houses, offices, parks, train routes and government buildings. What we so easily call ‘unruly’ or ‘messy’ has a deep social logic of its own. The market, in other words, was also a social institution.

By Sawaal Desk

Whose City? Kolkata’s Hawkers, Eviction and the Politics of Development

The city is changing. Economic and social relationships that have grown into its history are being torn up with it. The alternative to eviction should therefore be democratic reconstruction. Hawkers can be recognised as citizens rather than criminalised. Their right to trade can be protected. To talk about hawkers is never only to talk about hawkers. It is also to ask what we mean by urban democracy, public space, livelihood and development.

By Sawaal Desk

Hawkers’ Rights, Eviction and the Role of the State: Sawaal in conversation with Shaktiman Ghosh

Shaktiman Ghosh has decades of experience organising hawkers and fighting for their rights. In an economy marked by unemployment, job insecurity, and rising living costs, hawking remains one of the few available means of livelihood for millions of people. Ghosh’s account is at once the history of a decades-long movement, a critique of state policy and the role of political parties; it also points the direction the movement must take now.

By Sawaal Desk

Hawker Evictions and the Role of Trade Unions: Three Interviews

Anadi Sahu, Atanu Chakraborty and Ziaul Alam—all three interviewees place hawker evictions within the context of wider economic and political changes, though they differ in emphasis, interpretation and political standpoint. On one point, however, they are unequivocal: the real character of the crisis disappears if hawker eviction is treated only as a problem of ‘illegal occupation’ or urban beautification. Behind it lie the shortage of jobs, the crisis of the informal economy, pressure on small businesses and the growing insecurity of self-employed workers.

By Shubhendu Dasgupta

People of the ‘Unruly’ City: Kolkata’s Hawker Movement, the State and the Politics of Livelihood : Part-2

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 city therefore has to learn not only from planners, but from the people who live in it. Because a city is not only bricks, concrete, roads and titles to land. A city is a name for relationships between people.