Voilence of Commodity Aesthetics

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Economic and Political Weekly January 5, 2002 65

IIntroduction

The evolution of communications hasbeen highly compressed in southAsia. For example, the internet

arrived little more than a decade afternationwide television in most parts of India,and many public telephones only arrivedwhen television did. In a short time, anexplosion of communicative possibilities

has swept across a society of deep linguis-tic and regional divides and a small, albeitexpanding middle class. The uneven char-acter of the resulting development hasprovoked new forms of social imaginationthat cannot be understood simply as de-layed manifestations of events already seenelsewhere. A range of new practices areseen, for example, more individualised andflamboyant modes of comportment, along-side increasingly public and aggressivedefinition of singular identities that wereearlier more recessed, fluid and fuzzy. A

distinctive ensemble of commodity aesthe-tics is diffusing across not only the storesand bazaars, but other old and new urbanspaces as well as more intimate settings,displacing and transforming earlier under-standings of harmony and balance.

The media re-order perceptions, andprecipitate new ways of seeing and think-ing, but they do not emerge in isolation.They arise as part of a far-reaching changein social relations due to the growth andspread of markets. A provisional way of de-scribing them is in terms of the increasing

centrality of consumption to the formationof social identities. Previously identifiedas strictly private, consumption has be-come a new and unpredictable form ofcivic participation, distinct from thoseprevailing in the era of the developmentalstate. At one level, this is banal, but itdeserves more examination. It indexes notsimply the market behaviour economistshave taught us to recognise, but as wellthe accompanying circulation of imagesand information via the media. One wayof characterising the latest phase in theglobalisation of capital (to use ParthaChatterjees gloss on the word) is in termsof the exponentially increased circulationof non-material forms of property thatrequire public dissemination to ensure theirrealisation as privately appropriated value.Such forms of intellectual property arecharacterised by plenty rather than bypaucity, since they are essentially inex-haustible. They can therefore sustain modesof participation distinct from the competi-

tive, zero-sum activity of markets. Thesenew forms of solidarity are already beingmobilised, and require to be more accu-rately understood.

Thus, as businesses and political partiesboth target persons rather than masses,there arises a new intimacy of address,reinforced by sensuous evocations ofimages in the public domain, softening anddiffusing the forms of patriarchal author-ity, and revising older distinctions betweenpublic and private. Simultaneously, rela-tions between individuals tend to be

mediated more and more through marketsand media, increasing the distance betweenindividuals even as in imagination, theygrow closer. If markets circulate privateproperty, whose value increases with scar-city, the media generate abundance andgain value with circulation. Together,markets and media generate new kinds ofrights and new capacities for imaginationthat are not well recognised or understoodin existing forms of regulation or in pre-

vailing academic schema. New ideas ofbelonging or inclusion lead to novel waysof exercising citizenship rights and con-ceiving politics. The experience of inclu-sion in new circuits of communication andof sharing intellectual property acrossclasses, such as occurs for instance withtelevision, can help to politicise actorswho were previously more marginal. Inthis paper, I will examine the implicationsof this argument in terms of recent debatesover the rights of the hawker, or thepheriwala, in Mumbai.

IIThe Culture Industry andWorkers in the Informal

Economy

If the work of the culture industry forAdorno and Horkheimer was the produc-tion of a logic of commodification that inhi-bited critical awareness, Walter Benjaminunderstood culture rather as thepoliticisation of aesthetics, so that partici-pation in, not pacification through the image

Violence of Commodity AestheticsHawkers, Demolition Raids and a New

Regime of Consumption

As increasing trends point to businesses and political parties targeting persons rather thanmasses, forms of patriarchal authority are softened and diffused, leading to a revision of theolder distinctions that prevailed between public and private. At the same time, as relationsbetween individuals are mediated more through markets and media, they also generate new

kinds of rights and new capacities for imagination along with new ideas of belonging orinclusion that in turn, lead to novel ways of exercising citizenship rights and conceivingpolitics. This experience of inclusion in new circuits of communication and of sharing

intellectual property across classes, such as seen with television, can help to politicise thosesections previously marginalised. This paper, examines the implications of this argument in

terms of recent debates over the rights of the hawker, or the pheriwala, in Mumbai.

ARVIND RAJAGOPAL


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Economic and Political Weekly January 5, 200266

was central to mass-mediated society. Here,we can think of the moment of marketliberalisation in India through Benjaminsnotion of the relationship between thecultural and the political, but focus alsoon the ways in which metaphors of theeconomy and spectacles of consumptionunderwrite the political work of images.In doing so, I will focus on the relationship

between acts of consumption and scenesof destruction occurring under the sign ofemerging markets. Pheriwalas (lit., thosewho move around), or hawkers, roam thestreets of Indian cities, bearing baskets ontheir heads or pushing a handcart and callingout their wares, offering customers goodsand produce cheaper than in the stores.They are a part of the economy that spursconsumption, while functioning quin-tessentially as vagrant figures requiring tobe disciplined. The pheriwala is thus afigure bridging consumption and destruc-

tion. The pheriwala is a real figure, work-ing in circuits seen as illegal in relationto the formal economy, but is also meta-phorical, symbolising a kind of disorder,as a struggling but nevertheless illicitentrepreneur. The institutionalisation oftelevision (nationwide broadcasting be-ginning as recently as the 1980s) has infact worked to illuminate the illegitimacyof this life-form while rendering thepheriwala vulnerable to absorption in anew visual economy, with political con-sequences deserving examination.

There are several examples I can offerof pheriwalas appearing in street scenesin news or feature films shown on tele-vision. However, I will begin by consid-ering an example from advertising, sinceit is the genre making the closest connec-tions between culture, the economy andthe new visual regime instanced in tele-vision.1 We should note that, given thelimited purchasing power of most Indianconsumers, and advertisers own orienta-tion to urban middle class people like us(or PLUS), we cannot take for granted the

existence on television of an aestheticacceptable to popular audiences. With theestablishment of national television, it hasonly recently become viable to addresslarge consumer markets not only as aneconomically viable proposition, but alsoas an aesthetic one. Until this time, it wasassumed that creative input was requiredchiefly for the premium market, which isa minority Anglophone population. Withmarket liberalisation, the advertising in-dustry in India has begun investing in thecultivation of more indigenous regionally

inflected tastes.2 In the ad discussed below,conceived for a more downmarket prod-uct, we can glimpse the traces of the strati-fication and reorientation of sense percep-tions, and their enfolding into a newcommodity aesthetics.

III

A Scene of Consumption: theCup that Cheers

The ad is for Brooke Bond A-1 kadakchaap tea. Kadak chaap indicates that thisis strong tea (lit., the stamp of strength;kadak means strong, vigorous), and in India,the kind of tea favoured by working andrural classes.3 Tea stalls operating on citysidewalks would vend it. Staged in amelodramatic and filmi style, the ad showsa bulldozer, flanked by sinister-lookingfigures, demolishing undefined shantystructures on the street. The soundtrack is

suggestive of a war-zone, with helicoptersand air-raid sirens loud in the background.A swarthy, bearded man wearing darkglasses sits in the shadowy interior of awhite car, peering intermittently at hislawyer (or at any rate, a man in lawyerscostume) and his henchmen as they directthe demolition. Facing the bulldozer is ayoung woman in a white sari, drinking tea.Her costume suggests she is a social workeror an activist. The camera pauses a mo-ment to focus on the glass of tea in thewomans hand. On the street, tea is drunk

in glasses, and at home, it is drunk in cups.A roadside tea stall is being demolished,and the woman has decided to resist it.Sitting in front of the bulldozer, the womanchallenges the man at its wheel to run overher. A sharp exchange of words ensues inthe bulldozer operator taking to his heels,while the crowd lies down prone, all aroundthe machine. Brooke Bond A-1 kadak chaapworks its magic, and an unarmed womantriumphs over a gang of toughs.4

The ad stages a typical scene in Mumbaiand other cities in India, of the confron-

tation between the majority who dwell andmake their livelihood on the street, and theminority, who view the streets as but thecircuitry of the formal economy in whichthey themselves work. The ad offers sym-bolic redemption for the sidewalk resi-dents and vendors who are invariablyvanquished in such confrontations, butthrough the image of a consumer brand andthe rhetoric of a young, female consumer.

Now, everyday scenes of demolition areaccompanied by police squads and cityworkers; as representatives of the only

institution with usufruct in public space,namely, the state. The ad boldly dramatisesthe popular belief that the state is ruled bya class fraction partial to itself, or that itis hand-in-glove with criminals. The conun-drum of a state undertaking illegal actionis answered, appropriately enough, by acharismatic figure, a pretty heroine match-ing the goons tough talk with her own

fluent, idiomatic slang. Gendering theconfrontation lowers the political thresh-old for its reception, we may note, bringingas it does aspects other than the classcontradiction central to this conflict. Forthe ad to feature real pheriwalas mightperhaps distract from its aesthetic. Indeedthe life and work of pheriwalas themselvesare nowhere to be seen here; their exist-ence has to be inferred from the image ofthe bulldozer, the glass of tea, and BrookeBond A-1 kadak chaap. Characteristically,the growing market for national and global

consumer brands, which in part replacesthe informal economy of roadside stalls,seeks to absorb the image of that whichit replaces. But the audio track, shiftingfrom a melodramatic announcement of thebrand, to the soundscape of a battlefield,and the snappy repartee of street-talk,invokes the rhythms and lexical repertoireof popular cinema. The arcs of the visualand audio narratives both culminate in aglobal brand gone local, but in the waysthey traverse the lexicon of popular cul-ture, their moral economies overlap but do

not coincide.Despite its limitations, the ad offers more

vivid acknowledgement of the rights ofstreet vendors and of the depredations suf-fered by them in the terroristic regime ofMumbai city politics than is to be found inmost news reports; the latter tend to regardstreet vendors as illegitimate or as anachro-nistic, and serve mainly as vehicles for mid-dle class and corporate campaigns againstpheriwalas. The ad excludes the faces andvoices of pheriwalas, but a crucial aspect oftheir contemporary experience is portrayed:

demolition is implied to be a violation oftheir rights. Aimed at a lower incomesegment, but displaying high productionvalues, the ad is a symptom of an expan-ding visual regime in which the viewingpleasures and consuming power of work-ing class audiences have to be balancedagainst the interests of corporate sponsors.

The ad acknowledges the violence in-volved in the control over urban space, andthe spectacular forms through which ittakes effect.The violence is not simplyepiphenomenal to a project of political


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control: it is itself productive, linking itsaudience in a shared sense of fear andfascination. If in precapitalist society,sumptuary expenditure flowed to poorerclasses, in capitalism, for the first time wehave a ruling class that spends its incomechiefly on itself. The demolitions are per-haps a sign of the devolution of sumptuaryexpenditure, its rendition into a spectacle

for general enjoyment at the cost of thepoor themselves.5 With economic liberalis-ation, more concerted attempts to enticeforeign investment, and the growth of aconsuming middle class whose mode ofasserting their citizenship rights now typi-cally occurs by refiguring their relation-ship to the poor, such forms of violencehave gained emphasis, albeit with arhetoric that denies their illiberal nature.

Nevertheless, the prominence of thedebates over the pheriwala itself indicatesthe increasing assertiveness of the repre-

sentatives of this segment of the workforce.The assertiveness can be witnessed onlyfugitively, as in the above ad; in the majorityof news reports, which are in print ratherthan on film, the pheriwalas agency hasmainly to be read against the grain of newsaccounts, as I will show.

IVThe Pheriwala as a Contested

Figure of Indian Modernity

The education of the senses occurs

through the mass media, and throughlocalised struggles that disclose the par-ticular historical changes being wroughtin different city spaces. The media createsystems of disembodied perception thatnot only alter sense-ratios, but also priseexisting sensory combinations apart, to beput together in new ways. New technolo-gies of perception both reflect and precipi-tate shifts and divisions in class-dividedsensory vocabularies, and selectively re-inforce and transform the authority theycarry. The capacity for groups to influence

the forms of their public representation issymptomatic of these and other qualitativeand quantitative differences in power andstatus. Tracing the shifts occurring throughthe institution of a new economy of thevisible can help indicate the ways in whichnew knowledges acquire value, and arecontested. Recent debates in Mumbai overthe pheriwala help illuminate these shifts.Pheriwalas are entrepreneurs, not wageslaves, but the condition of their survivalis that they remain marginal, exposing theirbodies to the elements while underselling

those not obliged to do so. That an economyseeking to advance itself should retainancient means of circulating goods sug-gests many things about it, but interest-ingly, what becomes controversial is notthe inhuman treatment of pheriwalas or thegrotesque form of modernisation this rep-resents. The most prominent part of thecriticisms are in fact aesthetic and politi-

cal; street vendors are seen as offensive,inconvenient and illegitimate. Attempts toimpose order on city spaces are also aboutthe value of the real estate involved; orderand value are recurring themes in theaesthetic, economic and political argumentswaged here. Given the ability of thepheriwala to weave through the heteroge-neous zones of the city without necessarilyhaving the right to reside in them, it isperhaps not surprising that in a time ofunchecked urban growth, they become asymbol of metropolitan space gone out of

control. As such they become the exem-plary image of an unattainable disciplinaryproject. A climate of terror is instilledthrough demolition and destruction, illu-minating the despotic character of statepower under market liberalisation.6 Thefurore over pheriwalas is a symptom oflarger shifts this paper will attempt toclarify, in the relationship between politicsand culture.

In his meditations on the shopping ar-cades in 19th century Paris, Walter Ben-

jamin chose a figure who seemed the best

example of commodification renderedspectacular: the sandwich (board) man.The sandwichman was, for Benjamin,suggestive of the paradoxes of commodi-fied social relations, as a person reducedto a walking advertisement, and forced tomake his living in this way. If the sand-wichman was a marginal figure destinedto be overtaken by superior methods ofdisseminating commodities, this indicatedthe relegation of his function by societyas a whole, rather than rendering it obso-lete. The eclipse of the sandwichman thus

indicated the diffusion throughout societyof commodity relations whose presencewas until then only partial.7

In India the radical shifts underway inthe restructuring of economy might besymbolised in the somewhat analogousfigure of the pheriwala, against whom afurious campaign is currently under wayin the press and by the BrihanmumbaiMunicipal Corporation (formerly theBombay Municipal Corporation). Pheri-walas are entrepreneurs, not wage slaves,but they must expose their bodies to the

elements while underselling those notobliged to do so. But objections to pheri-walas tend to regard them as perpetratorsof an injustice to the public, rather thanas victims. Such debates signal, perhaps,the obstinately incomplete character ofmodernity in a country like India (reflectedin news stories with titles such as CanMumbai Ever Become a Global City?8 ).

The hawker belongs to the informaleconomy, and indeed provoked the con-cept itself.9 In India at least, the distinctionis an invidious one, since the economywould collapse without its innumerableinformal components; informality re-fers mainly to the lack of protection againstexploitative conditions of work, and indi-cates the different rhetoric of state poweroperative in this segment. Unlike thesandwichman, pheriwalas are not about todisappear, quite the contrary. As a wholethe formal economy excludes the majority

of the population. This highlights theinseparability of political from economicrelations in Indian capitalism; the law mustsanction violence in order to protect thesalaried classes privileges and deny therest their rights. What then brings theotherwise unremarkable exercise of vio-lence against this segment of the informaleconomy into the news?

A brief discussion of the backgroundmay help illuminate the recent scandalconstructed around pheriwalas. With ex-ploding population, pheriwalas in Mumbai

have found it convenient to remain statio-nery rather than mobile. Their right tooccupy public space is hence increasinglyunder dispute. But over half the populationin Mumbai are squatters, occupying lessthan 2 per cent of the citys land; as suchif encroachment is a problem that dimin-ishes public space, it is also a solution toa larger problem of maldistributed re-sources. But the juristic climate today isless sympathetic to the poor, with a newgeneration of judges in court who viewolder, more inclusive ideals of Nehruvian

development partly responsible for thecountrys failure to become a world power.If during an earlier wave of public interestlitigation, the right to life included theright to earn a livelihood,10 today it isrights to unrestricted public space thatare understood to be threatened bypheriwalas. If campaigns for pheriwalarights partake in the general, all-roundincrease in public assertiveness, they aremore than matched by a wave of middleclass activism championing varieties ofnimbyism.


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Practices of surveillance and control inthe west are relatively advanced, with, forinstance, high tech optical and pressure-sensitive devices, and new systems ofarchitectural and urban planning that takeall-too-seriously the idea of the city as aspace of flows. If flnerie was the modelof urban pleasure in an earlier time, theconcern of planners today is in producing

spaces that are clean, that is, easilysurveillable, bum proof and hospitableabove all to the rapid movement of peopleand things.11 The meshing of finely-honedinformation systems with sophisticatedassemblages of policing and control ren-ders the city more of a controlled environ-ment where the derelict, ill and unhousedare made invisible.12 As a result the in-creasing social polarisation of the cityoccurs relatively imperturbably, beneaththe political radar.

The disappointment of managers and

planners is undoubtedly great that they areunable to reproduce metropolitan conditionsin Mumbai. The chaos and violence of theirefforts to achieve it suggest that in Mumbaias elsewhere, the promise of globalisationis fulfilled in distinct ways. For one thingthe numbers are too great; pheriwalas inMumbai number half a million or higher,a significant fraction of the population. Thecosts of controlling them are unaffordablefor a city whose police are so underpaid thatmany of them moonlight for the ganglordsthey are supposed to restrain.13 The will to

curb them is weakened by the enormousfines and bribes collected by the city cor-poration and the police (totalling between1.2 and 3 billion rupees a year).14 Pheriwalasfight back, in court and on the streets, de-termined not to let their right to survive betaken away from them.15

The informal sector was supposed toprovide the reserve labour force that fedthe formal economy as it expanded. Pre-cisely the opposite has happened, interest-ingly. In 1961, 65 per cent of Mumbaisworkforce was employed in the organised

sector and the remainder in the unorganisedsector; 30 years later the proportion wasreversed. By 1991, 65 per cent of employ-ment was in the unorganised sector.16

Although middle classes are fond of claim-ing that pheriwalas are well-to-do free-loaders, most vendors are poor and mar-ginal.17 Nevertheless, these figures sug-gest that the dynamics of this segment ofthe economy might illuminate the chang-ing forms of state regulation with liberalis-ation, and the differentiated political ca-pacities made available to citizens.

The pheriwala is a figure not simply ofan inability to shed the past; s/he may evenbe seen as a harbinger of the new Indianeconomy, where middle classes need re-assurance that they can move ahead andstill retain the privileges of human servi-tude. The following, somewhat awkwardlywritten, extract from a marketing columninThe Economic Times, subtitled Hardsell:

Inside Indian Marketing, is revealing.

The pheriwallah, for the uninitiated, hasbeen an enduring Indian symbol of busi-ness at your doorstep. What does he sell?Well, he can be selling anything from fruitsto fragrances or even readymade eatablesto green vegetables. What does he signify?He is a man on the move for your sakethereby eking out a living for himself andbaking his cake! In marketing lingo, he isthe convenience man reaching out to hiscustomers far and wide.For a moment lets go down our respectivememory lanes. Can we re-live those lazysummer afternoons when, after being backfrom morning schools we used to wait forsomeone. It was siesta time for mosthouseholds when suddenly piercing thetranquility clang rang the bell. The ice-candy man cometh!These guys rang thebell along with their customary yell. Theaccompanying yell underlined the productsold.Dont we marketers spot here azillion possibilities to sell something orother to a large spread of audience rangingfrom the young to the young at heart?The pheriwallah denotes three virtuesand a singular vice. He provides us withconvenience shopping at our doorstep,value deals and recurrent service but heis low on the quality front. The reason canbe that he is mostly selling unbrandedgoods or cheap commodities. If a delib-erate transition can be made here from theunbranded to the branded platform, thislowly pheriwallah can become an invin-cible brand icon. Companies looking foravenues in morph marketing may find anideal bundle of services here to augmenttheir product with. Cant we have Cokepheriwallahs in red T-shirts serving uschilled bottles of the real thing right at our

doorstep? Even FMCG (Fast Moving Con-sumer Goods) major, Hindustan Lever hasplans to go this way...Such branded servicecan be very convenient to working couplesand others whose leisure time is always ata premium. They would not mind payinga bit more for this premium service.18

Pheriwalas are relegated to the pastalthough they could augur the economy ofthe future, in view of their explodingnumbers. For pheriwalas to be entrepre-neurs is anachronistic, it emerges. Prop-erly uniformed and positioned, they can

be folded into the premium service trade.Memories of an idyllic past, appearing assounds that disrupt/invoke the calm ofbygone siestas, are re-enacted as red T-shirted Coke pheriwallahs.The shift froman auditory to a visualregisteris accom-panied by the changing character of pro-ducts sold, from a petty commodity basisto one of global brand icons. The intimate

pleasures of a middle-class child in beingwaited upon can be recollected and trans-muted in the more sophisticated upmarketconsumption of adults. Branding the per-sons and products of workers in theinformal economy emerges as a way ofovercoming underdevelopment andkeeping it too.

When Marx defines the work of capital,he invokes the emergence of a singleunqualified and global subjectivity, re-flecting the extension of capital across theworld: all activities without distinction,

productive activity in general, the solesubjective essence of wealth. Togetherwith the abstract universality of practicesgenerating wealth arises the universalityof what is understood as wealth, viz, theproduct in general, or labour in general,but as past, materialised labour.19 Whendevelopments ascend to this level of gen-erality, labour is no longer perceived asthis or that particular form, such as slaveryor serfdom, but as naked labour, and wealthis no longer seen as traders wealth or asusury but instead as homogeneous, inde-

pendent capital. In such a context, labourand capital become categories firmly rootedin popular prejudice, and the state, whichensures the conditions for capital extrac-tion, would be superfluous. Political domi-nation, which exists to enable accumula-tion, becomes unnecessary, as economicappropriation is self-sustaining.20

In fact, of course, this never happens.Capital and labour both appear obstinatelyheterogeneous, unable to discipline them-selves within any given boundaries, con-stantly spilling over and violating their

terms of existence, in other words posingthe banal truths of accumulation andexploitation as against their pure image.

At the level of the image, however,it becomes possible for diverse and con-tradictory forms to abut each other in ap-parent harmony. Vision in capitalist mo-dernity is the least intimate sensory datum;thus fleeting glances between strangers arepreferred forms of interaction in an urbansetting.21 By the same token, vision be-comes more important as a medium facili-tating the institution of a more generalised


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system of exchange, alongside the economyand in interaction with it. Detached andisolated from the other senses, vision masksthe multiple forms of perceptual experi-ence, and helps in the propagation ofabstracted and objectified systems ofknowledge.22 Auditory information re-quires, in comparison, more situated se-mantic knowledge, inflected as it is through

the multiple registers of accent, cadence,pitch and tone.

The aesthetics of display at a pheriwalasfacilitate more direct sensory interactionwith the producer/seller of the goods, andoffers the consumer more access to a fullerexperience of the product or service beingoffered. The emphasis is usually on thepheriwala who is the focal point of the stall,and as well on a small range of productsand services, e g, telephone calls and coco-nut milk, or, cigarettes and chewing to-bacco. The arrangements are usually mini-

mal; a sackcloth on a wooden platform,a matchbox-like structure with shelves, ahandcart with a wooden or aluminum top.Decorations are functional where they exist,and might consist of gaily coloured sachetstrips, e g, of betel nut, chewing tobaccoor of shampoo, suspended from a stringrunning horizontally across a shelf, or ofplates of artfully cut fruit. If food is beingmade, the smell of the oil, the conditionof the utensils, the quality of the foodstuffsand the personal hygiene of the cook areall on display. As a former pheriwala

pointed out to me, in no restaurant can onefollow so minutely every phase of theprocess of preparing a dish. Conditions inrestaurants are typically worse, he observed,because the owners feel sure that few willventure within.23

Transactions with pheriwalas, in all theirnakedness, enact the most elemental formof market exchange. The market, Braudelreminds us, brings the arenas of productionand consumption into contact with eachother. It thus acts as the interface with theoutside world for each of these realms,

with the unknown and unpredictable. Themarket, he writes, is like coming up for air,bringing one face to face with the other.24

Here we have the unruly energy of thebazaars, the assault of different sensations,and varieties of costume and countenance.Commodities lie available for inspectionand comparison across competing stalls,mediated only by the typically fluid, dia-logical encounter over pricing and pay-ment. It is here more than in any othermarket environment, we may remindourselves, that the customer is truly king.

This is of course worlds away from themanicured precincts of the modern depart-mental store, whose efficiency in sourc-ing, pricing and selling are known. As thepower of sellers increases, it becomesimportant to control the point of purchase,to render it static and predictable ratherthan allow unforeseeable elements toproliferate.25 And here enters all the wiz-

ardry of consumer seduction, of imagery,illumination and design, whether of pack-aging, shopfloor arrangement or storefrontdisplay. No one can deny the power suchdisplays can attain. A strictly economiccalculation of return on investment is notadequate to explain the form of display.There is a distinct aesthetic at work, fash-ioned so that on seeing it, investors maybe satisfied their money is well spent.26

The aesthetic works to build layers ofmeaning around the commodity, mediat-ing the act of consumption to buyers. In

comparison, the pheriwala provides onlyherself as a mediating body, and this isprecisely the problem. For a new visualregime to be instituted in the process ofmetamorphosing a pheriwala economy intoa store and mall-based one is no simplematter, however, especially if the wish totranscend pheriwalas is destined to be invain. Violence is inseparable from thisshift, and in the imagination of the process,television is an accomplice. Theorisingtelevision in terms of the social relationsit interweaves with is helpful in under-

standing this process.

VTelevision and the

Politicisation of Aesthetics

In most critical accounts, television isunderstood in terms of its ideologicalpower, by virtue of the ruling order itsprings from, and in terms of the ideas ithelps circulate. A certain abstractioncharacterises these arguments, so thatdomination occurs without viewers being

aware of it, and despite the fact that view-ers own experience of television (includ-ing that of critics) does not imply such anoutcome. Any adequate analysis of tele-vision must address this omission.

As a medium, televisions work is para-llel to and interlinked with that of theeconomy. Both disseminate informationto help circulate goods as well as to socialisemembers of society.27 Television is thusactive in the material and symbolic repro-duction of capitalist relations. Todd Gitlinhas pointed out that just as, under capi-

talism, the surplus value accumulated insocial labour is privately appropriated, menand women are estranged from the mean-ings they produce socially; these are pri-vately appropriated by mass media andreturned to them in alienated forms.28 Butthe sense of exploitation that inhabits theworkplace is absent before television. Thereis a sense rather of viewing as an autono-

mous act, done on ones own time. Thisexperience of autonomy is an indivisiblepart of televisions effect, and must beincorporated in any understanding of themediums power.

Raymond Williams work on the me-dium as both technology and cultural formpoints to its dual character, and offers theconcept of flow as a means of specifyingtelevisions distinctness.29 At one level,the term refers to programme compositionas a sequence of unrelated items, governedby broadcasting rather than audience in-

terests. As Williams points out, within theflow of television programming is embed-ded another flow, that of advertising, thatappears on no published schedule and yet isthe motor of the entire process; audiencesare the creation of an economic processdesigned to serve sponsors.30 We can ex-tend Williams metaphor to what is perhapsthe most distinctive aspect of the techno-logy, namely its ability to tether diversetemporal flows together.31Television audi-ences across society tune in to program-mes, their time of viewing flowing along-

side but separate from the time of theimage.32 If they inhabit the same space inclock time, as lived duration, they are notthe same. Thus the packaging of audiencesfor sale to sponsors and the use of ratingsto signal popularity may bothoccur with-out the knowledge or consent of viewers,and indeed are thereby more effectivelyachieved. At the same time, viewers canentertain programmes at their leisure,unconstrained by any authority the mes-sages might claim for themselves.

Television yokes together different tem-

poralities in one communicative event.Electronically mediated messages fromdiverse and far-ranging sources, often atbest partially related to viewers own ex-periences, tend to lack the relatively deeper,more situated meanings of oral or printculture. This indexes a thinning of time,hence meaning, experienced as a reductionof social control, and as relative freedom.Yet the experience of communication, asMarshall McLuhan correctly describes it, isof participation and sociality, and a tactilesense of being in touch, regardless of the


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content communicated.33The existence ofan ongoing stream of communicationshared by others engenders a sense ofintimacy across social boundaries, asClaude Lefort has suggested.34 Thus onthe one hand, television offers respite fromthe compulsions of actually existing socialrelations, creating a space of temporaryimmunity from the inhibitions and pro-

scriptions they would impose on anymember. On the other hand, it evokesfeelings of closeness and reciprocity tounknown participants who may exist onlyin imagination.

There is a contradictory character to thisprocess. Although television operateswithin the logic of capitalist exchange, theimplicit logic of audiences own transac-tion, I suggest, can be better understoodin terms of anthropological argumentsabout the gift, with the experience of themedium being one of an unconditional,

mutual interaction with others. The timeinterval between the reception of program-ming and viewers own counter-gift, oftalking back to others, to the medium orits sponsors, preserves the impression ofunqualified reciprocity underlying anidealised notion of gift exchange. Thistemporal structure serves as an instrumentof denial, as Pierre Bourdieu has shown,allowing a subjective truth (of reciprocity)to exist alongside a contrary, objectivetruth (of the absence of reciprocity, i e, ofthe impossibility of talking back to a

monological medium).35Gift and commodity exchange are al-

ways implicated in each other; neither everexists by itself in a pure sense. No com-modity transaction is purely instrumental;there is always a sense of reciprocity invol-ved; similarly any exchange of gifts alwayshas an element of calculation in it. Tele-vision does something distinct to this en-tanglement. It invokes the logic of the giftwithin the private space secured by com-modity exchange. (And what it offers isactually a commodity: communication in

exchange for which audiences offer theirtime, which is in turn sold to advertisers.)Because the transaction is intangible,what audiences receive has all the ap-pearance of a free gift, the gift thatentails no obligation, like a manufacturerspromotional item. The experiences ofgift and commodity exchange can hencebe separated, and thereby imagined asseparate as well.

Similarly, communication systems im-pute the sense of an intimacy across so-ciety, and presume the existence of an

ongoing social connection independent ofaudience response. The terms in which thisconnection is experienced, however, donot entail the costs or obligations throughwhich social interaction otherwise occurs.The private space of reception enables theimagining of a free engagement withmedia messages, and the latter thus be-come open to imaginative reconstruction.

Audiences can thus imagine new commu-nities of sentiment, in fantasies of com-plete acceptability where the discipliningpresence of other minds can be made toretreat, so entailing none of the usual costsof social membership. At the same time,this newly crafted autonomy provides them

the critical distance with which it is pos-

sible to reflect on society itself as an external

object of thought, independent of their

own place in it.36

As Arjun Appadurai has argued, theimagination has an unprecedented prove-

nance in contemporary society, due in partto the media.37 I suggest that we can locatethe present-day salience of the imagina-tion, as well as the forms it takes, in thecontext of media and markets, and at theintersection of commodity exchange andthe affective economy of the gift. Pre-existing understandings are of courseinadequate to grasp the ways in whichsocial relations are transformed by widen-ing circuits of exchange. Moreover, ifaudiences feel independent of prevailingconstraints, they can imagine themselves

within altogether new kinds of associa-tions that arise from, but do not in anysimple way reflect, the market conditionsof their existence. If media and marketshave typically been conceived as advanceguards of modernisation and secularism,my analysis here indicates why their po-litical outcomes might lead in very differ-ent directions. Crucially, any elite-ledprocess of development must confront theirreducible and indeed mushrooming ex-istence of popular affiliations that a me-dium like television provokes, and ac-

knowledge the new communities of sen-timent it may give rise to.38

Critical arguments about television tendto point to the ways in which it replicatesthe logic of commodification by extendingit to communication, and thus intensifiesprocesses of capitalist alienation and ex-propriation. Socially produced meaningsare privately appropriated, throughtelevisions generation and distribution ofcultural products, and returned to audi-ences in alienated forms, in this account.The circulation of images both enables the

circulation of capital and takes it to anotherlevel, deepening the reach of the produc-tion of value by embracing more spheresof life within the joint work of media andmarkets. But a strictly utilitarian calculusdoes not adequately capture the power ofimages here there is an excess that theyrepresent over and beyond facilitatingeconomic exchange, that is disciplinary, in

subjecting the visible world to a visualregime, structuring the mode of its admis-sibility onto the stage of representation,and thus introducing a new principle forthe self-representation of people and things.We can think about the production ofimages as a kind of naming, whose quin-tessence is represented through the brandand the logo; this presupposes the powerof conferring singularity, and points to theviolence implied in this imposition.

But this is far from a one-sided process,since by the same token, television creates

a new field for the imagination, where, inthe private space of commodity consump-tion, individuals can conceive of dialogi-cal social communication independent oftheir place in society. The private spaceof reception enables the imagining of afree engagement with media messages,and the latter thus become open to imagi-native reconstruction. Audiences can thusimagine new communities of sentiment, infantasies of complete acceptance wherenone of the usual costs of social member-ship are entailed. At the same time, this

newly crafted autonomy provides themthe critical distance with which it is pos-sible to reflect on society itself as an ex-ternal object of thought, independent oftheir own place in it.If television partici-pates in elevating the stakes of represen-tation and in instituting symbolic violence,it more generally indexes not only theaestheticisation of politics, but as well thepoliticisation of aesthetics, enlarging as itdoes the field of politics and lowering thecost of admission at the same time.39

On the one hand, the work of television

helps commodify virtual space, and thisprocess is accompanied by the commodi-fication of real urban spaces, and theirsubordination to globalising visual regimes(i e, that accomplish their task partly bydeclaring their status as global). What thisleads to is an escalated contest over theright to reconvert homogenised urbanspaces into lived places, and the battle byauthorities in turn to recommodify them,and render them spaces of traffic in goodsand people rather than domesticated spacesresistant to incorporation in larger circuits.


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A brief discussion of the demolition raidscarried out last summer in Mumbai affordsa sense of how this activity itself turns intoa spectacle for public consumption.

VIDemolitions: a Glimpse of

Field Action

At the helm of the demolitions in Mumbaiin 2000-2001, was G R Khairnar, formerdeputy Municipal Commissioner, and fora period Officer on Special Duty (OSD),in charge of demolitions. He became fa-mous for his fearless targeting of affluentbuilders violating zoning rules, and for hispublic accusations that the chief ministerwas associated with criminals, a charge hecontinues to make against successivegovernments. He is considered both incor-ruptible and ruthless.

Khairnar is a man with a soft voice and

a hard stare. He is slim and unassumingin appearance, and steadfast in his purpose.He has been attacked more than 100 times,he says, by builders intent on stopping hisdemolitions, on one occasion being shotin the leg and on another, wounded in thehead with a sword. (While in his post, hehad an armed escort at all times.) Throughall of it he has been unflinching in hisdemolition of illegal constructions, whichin Mumbai, luxuriate like weeds. This hasmeant going after high rise apartments inelite localities like Malabar Hill as well as

bulldozing slums and roadside stalls. Thepolitical parties are gangs, he says, and thepoliticians gangsters. He corrects himself.Politicians are devoid of even that sparkof humanity dacoits might have, he says.They care nothing for people. A nexusbetween bureaucrats, the political mafiaand business has replaced the rule of law.Ordinary people do anything they can tosurvive, compounding the lawlessness, heclaims. Instead of cultivating a scientifictemper, emotion, religion and caste issuesare used to get peoples votes, and deepen

the problem, Khairnar argues. His ownduty is to uphold the law. Hawkers, andmany others, ignore or defy the law, andKhairnars contribution is to teach themthe value of discipline, as he sees it. My

job is to convert shops (that encroach onpublic space, back) into hawkers, he said.I try to warn them, tell them to enforcediscipline on their own. If my warnings arenot heeded then I will demolish.40

But he invited me to accompany him onfield action and see for myself. His smiledas he invited me. Without his saying any-

thing further, I felt a certain exhilarationat the prospect.

On the appointed day, I boarded a Marutivan with Khairnar and a French documen-tary team doing a TV series on globalcities. In Mumbai, Khairnar was their firststop, interestingly. The convoy that ac-companied us was an impressive one: abulldozer, two jeeps with policemen, two

trucks to carry away confiscated goods,and Khairnars van. As we arrived at anopen air vegetable market, the halt of theconvoy had an impressive effect. Basketsof vegetables began to be hoisted on theheads of their anxious owners, as they fledthe scene. Those vendors who had in-vested most in their produce were in forthe greatest loss, as it was not possible toremove everything from the advancing crewin time. Brilliant red tomatoes rolled inevery direction. In seconds, scores of peoplegathered from all around to watch, and the

whole street was suddenly crowded.Khairnar strode in briskly, pointing hereand there, and the bulldozer went intoaction, clawing off here a gunny awningwith its slender bamboo supports, and therecrumpling up patchwork roofs. The BMCstaff darted around to grab produce todeposit in their goods trucks. The spec-tacle of destruction is riveting: the abruptobliteration of carefully gathered andnurtured matter, of accumulated time andenergy. That such devastation can bewrought without reprisal deepens this

fascination, since it confirms the sense ofthe extent of the power at work.

What must it feel like to have demolitionvictims at your mercy? One woman whoseroadside shack was being torn down at thesame time was weeping and beggingKhairnar with folded hands to save herhome. Her child was crying too. Addressingthe girl Khairnar asked, Who taught youto weep like that? His sympathies hadhardened over time. But the childs tearswere genuine; for some reason the road-side shack, miserable as it was, ought

not to have been demolished, althoughthe task was already half-finished. Thecrew departed, assuring the poor womanthat she should come to Sirs office forcompensation.

When I described the events Id seen tofriends who lived in Mumbai, I expectedto hear sympathetic cries of indignation.Although each of them was left of centre,in each case I was given a talking-to.Hawkers were taking over the city, settingup shop wherever they liked and inter-fering with the rights of long-standing

residents, one said. The owner of one ofthe stalls came to work in a car everymorning, another friend said. These peoplemight work by the roadside, but they weremaking loads of money while paying notaxes or rent. A third friend gave me theexample of the Harbour train line in thecity, on which trains ran at a fraction oftheir former speed because of encroach-

ments on either side. Half a million peoplewere ferried on that line everyday, andspent at least 30 minutes more than nec-essary; huge losses in man-hours resultedfrom misguided compassion like mine, itseemed.

Some friends described it candidly as anattempt to wreak such losses on the hawk-ers that it would become uneconomical forthem to do business. Others saw it as anattempt to clean up public space, to restorepedestrians their long-denied rights. Every-one formulated it in terms of an attempt

to restore rationality, to overcome illegal-ity and to assert the law. This was itselfinteresting. In fact, vendors and news-papers both report that bulldozers are regu-larly sent to destroy them without warn-ing.41 Although Khairnar claims alwaysto issue a preliminary signal, the presidentof the Hawkers Union, Sharad Rao,accused politicians of turning a blind eyeto the rampage being carried on inKhairnars name. For the past two months,the indiscriminate eviction of hawkers anddestruction of their goods has been going

on, but not a single MLA or MLC hasspoken against it, he said.42 K Pocker,general secretary of Bombay HawkersAssociation was careful to specify hisobjection: We are not challenging thedemolition action, but destruction of goodsis not permitted by law.43

But the issue of encroachment, whetherby hawkers or slum-dwellers, could noteven arise if it was not sanctioned by localpolitical bosses and ward officers, whooperate to deliver votes to members of thelegislative assembly or of the legislative

council, and receive favours from theorganised building trades that erect shan-ties. (Naik) Builders violate zoning andother laws with impunity, encroachingon public space, protected by politicianswho draw on their votes at election time,and in some cases, provide free utilityservices to the residents in return. Manyproblems arise and persist because of theinadequacies of urban planning and theconnivance of politicians and bureau-crats, but recently, pheriwalas become thescapegoats for a range of them, being the


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most visible links in the chain, and the leastprotected.

Violence, Geography and theFigure of the Pheriwala

A recent volume published by the UrbanDesign and Research Institute, which seeksto help restore the heritage value of

Mumbais architecture, observed, in oneof the more liberal statements made nowa-days on the subject of hawkers:

In recent years a phenomenon that has beenon the rise and has acquired alarmingproportions has been that of street hawkersand unauthorised hawking activity. Thereis no doubt that while the hawkers are ahindrance to the movement of pedestrians,they serve the contemporary need. Movingthem to some out of the way location isan impractical solution. The majority ofoffice workers need these very hawkersfor their everyday needs. It could be pro-

posed to formulate a series of otlas(platforms), each of which could accom-modate four hawkers with a clearly demar-cated space. The licence number of thehawker is laid in-situ into the otla, so thatany unauthorised occupant can be imme-diately spotted and apprehended.44

The chaos of pheriwala activity is thussought to be regulated by arranging themfor optimal surveillability. Another schemeoffered by an urban planner recommendeddress codes to help the public identifyregistered hawkers.45 A more character-istic account, however, is the one that

follows:Mumbais most tenacious resident apartfrom the slum-dweller the hawker hashad the civic authorities searching theircollective imagination for over four yearsto find a solution to the ubiquitous problemthey pose.The legal stop-signs at everyturn almost mock at the authorities, who fordecades have allowed the street vendorsto proliferate any which way.And expe-rience has shown that once they set up shopthere is no wishing them away, even fora few hours. Then there is a more linearthough equally baffling impediment thevendors sheer numbers. For one, there isno official estimate of how many hawkersuse Mumbais network of roads as a giantestablishment.Still, one things for sure,their numbersare multiplying with everypassing day.46

Hawkers are like vermin in this and otheraccounts; their main tendency is to pro-liferate, and that is by definition, a prob-lem. One hawker will lead to many more,which in turn will create an unhygienic,unsavoury environment, in the view ofYusuf Malani, advocate, of the SaveVersova Beach Association.47

The BMC (Brihanmumbai MunicipalCorporation, formerly Bombay MunicipalCorporation) proposed, in 1998, to createhawking zones outside which vendingwould be prohibited. As soon as the loca-tion of the zones began to be marked out,residents of neighbourhoods erupted inprotest, and filed suit against the corpo-ration. With its right to sanction hawkers

ensconcement in particular neighborhoodschallenged in court, the BMC proposedcreating non-hawking zones instead.48

This of course hardly resolved the prob-lem, as the rest of the city was implied tobe fair game for the hawkers. With everypart of the city reserved for one purposeor other, as public thoroughfares, parks,gardens, etc, legislative amendments arerequired to de-reserve them, before reserv-ing them anew for hawking (or not). Butthe informality of the situation is conve-nient for those in power who depend on

the hawkers insecurity to ensure a flowof votes and money. Hawkers in busy cityareas may be threatened three to four timesa day by city workers, paying upto Rs 4500to keep them at bay.49 With an estimatedRs 120 crore being collected annually inthe form of haftas, many stake holdershave emerged to successfully challengeany attempts at reducing their hold orimposing rules. The irony is that much ofthe restoration work is led by older inhab-itants of the city, living in apartments theyretain against landlords pleas to vacate,

paying rents that remain at 1950 levels.This is thanks to pro-tenant court rulingsthat works against new in-migrants byraising prices of available properties andrestricting the supply of new housing.

The national emergency imposed byprime minister Indira Gandhi between1975 and 1977 saw the imposition of manydraconian policies, among them, so-calledurban beautification programmes thatviolently displaced thousands of squattersand slum dwellers far away from theirerstwhile homes. With the reinstitution of

the Congress government at the centre in1980, state use of violence to open up cityspaces began again, starting with A RAntulays government in Maharashtra, ofwhich Bombay (now Mumbai) is thecapital. Public Interest Litigations (PILs),which emerged in the early 1980s as aresponse to the emergency, broadened theavenues for disadvantaged persons toapproach the courts. The landmark case inpheriwala rights was a judgment by theSupreme Court in 1985, stipulating thatas long as they did not erect permanent

structures in public spaces, the right ofhawkers to seek a living was constitution-ally protected.50Licences for hawkers werediscontinued in 1962;51 there exist only15,000 licensed hawkers in the city, andcurrent estimates of their total populationrange from 1,30,000 to 5,00,000. The clo-sure of textile mills in Mumbai over thelast several years, and the sale of mill

lands in violation of land-use restrictions,forced tens of thousands of workers intothe informal economy, burgeoning thenumbers of hawkers.

The recent wave of attacks on encroach-ment began, auspiciously enough for thewell-to-do in India, with Operation Sun-shine in December 1996, a drive launchedby the Left Front-ruled West Bengal govern-ment. In it, nearly 1,00,000 pheriwalasfrom Calcuttas streets were uprooted. Thedrive was allegedly launched to make thecity look attractive for foreign investment

on the eve of the visit of the then Britishprime minister John Major. A few weekslater, the West Bengal legislative assemblypassed a bill making hawking a cognisableand non-bailable offence punishable withrigorous imprisonment upto three months,a fine of 250 rupees, or both.52The generalsecretary of the Communist Party (Marxist)-affiliated Calcutta Street Hawkers Union,Mohammed Nizammeddin, demanded ofa reporter, What is going on? Are hawkersour new class enemy?53

In Mumbai, however, the discourse

focused on issues of appearance andhygiene, although it was dismissive ratherthan hortatory. Here for instance is anaccount of a roadside food stall:

After the lunch hour, the vendors pull outplastic tubs filled with used steel plates andsoak them in dirty water. The plates aredried with a soiled rag and reused. Watermeant for cooking is stored in rusted tins tobe used later. For these and other reasons,those who eat in roadside stalls are exposingthemselves daily to gastroenteritis, jaun-dice, typhoid and a host of other diseases.54

Whether it is the eye of this reporter that

is jaundiced or the bodies of consumers,it often appeared that the problems ofurban space devolved entirely onto streetvendors.55 Thus: The plight of pedestri-ans in Mumbai is pitiable. Most roads inMumbai (including newly laid Develop-ment Plan roads) do not have footpaths.And footpaths, wherever they exist, areencroached upon by hawkers.56 [W]herethey are reinstalled is not our problem,said M S Vaidya, president of Sion (east)Residents Forum, one of several associa-tions against the drive to create hawking


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zones in their neighbourhood.57 Clearly,we are not interested in throwing hawkersinto the Arabian Sea, a member of onecitizens group assured a reporter.58 Aresidents association in Churchgate com-plained to the ward authorities that hawk-ers had left practically no space forpedestrians and customers and made itconvenient for small-time thieves and shop-

lifters to indulge in pickpocketing, mis-behaviour with ladies, etc.59 Many shop-keepers, for their part, claimed hawkersdiverted business from their stores. Forexample, shopkeepers around Flora Foun-tain who deal in books and cassettes claimedto suffer due to hawkers who sell piratedcassettes and duplicate books at about halfthe price. Legitimate business of shopsis being robbed specially on the D N Roadarea where several hawkers sell smuggledluxury goods, according to Gerson DaCunha, convener of the solid waste man-

agement committee of Bombay First. Aconvener of the Citizens Forum for Pro-tection of Public Spaces, a voluntarymovement to deal with the hawking woes(sic) declared, By patronising such hawk-ers we are giving rise to a cancer in thesociety and abetting crime. The hotelindustry claims it loses at least Rs 5 milliondaily due to hawkers. They are snatchingaway business from right under our nose,acording to Association of Hotels andRestaurants vice president Ravi Gandhi.On days when hawkers are on strike, our

business goes up by 30 to 40 percent.60Hawkers are thus described as illegitimatecompetition, and as a drain on the legiti-mate economy.

The Power of Hawkers

In fact, as I have already observed,hawkers provide services to the majority.Drivers, masons, carpenters, building se-curity staff and other workers are regularcustomers of the food and tea stalls.61

For the same pulav in a restaurant, I will

have to pay Rs 200 rupees, while here itcosts me Rs 10, and there is no differencein quality, one customer at Nariman Pointobserved.62 The Bombay Hawkers Asso-ciation president K Pocker explained, Ourclientele is completely different from theirs(ie, regular stores). We do not sell brandedproducts and offer cheaper products. Wecater to the poor and weaker sections. 63

The heterogeneity of the hawkers acti-vity emerges against an unspoken sensethat the formal or organised sectors workis none of these things. We work honestly

in order to eat, and yet we are attacked fordoing so, remarked Ram Singh, apheriwala at a hawkers organising meet-ing. What are we supposed to do?64

Pheriwalas will always be with us,Munna Seth, who controls the handcartbusiness in Ghatkopar (West), in Mumbai.If the BMC tear down our stalls, we willuse handcarts. If they confiscate the hand-

carts, then we will spread our goods onthe footpaths. If they push us off thefootpaths, then we will be walking thestreets with headloads. If they send us offto Bhayander or Dahisar, we will still boardthe train and come back into town every-day. We will keep coming back. Nothingwill stop us, because our survival is atstake.65

Sobha Singh, who runs the handcartbusiness with his brother Munna Seth,explained:

The pheriwala is the cause of trouble. Thepheriwala is a very poor and small person.A poor man has to learn to behave himself.If the public says that the cart is in the wayhe should say yes and move his cart. Buttodays pheriwala says Gandu tum bolnewala kaon hai. ((Expletive) who are youto tell me?). The road is of the public andhe has the right to say that. But he doesnot respect the public.

Sobha Singh puts his finger on the issue:todays pheriwala fights back, and doesnttake violations of his rights quietly. In-deed, despite being marginal, hawkers, as

energetic residents of Indias most enter-prising city, find many sophisticated meansof fighting back, if necessary using thevery levers the city mobilises against them.To take one example, city officials levypaotis, or refuse collection charges, andissue receipts against payment. Paotis havebecome, in the absence of other officialacknowledgement of their existence, thevehicle for street vendors to move courtsand win injuctions in their favour againstcivic authorities.66

Hawkers have also learned to use the

courts instrumentally. Some hawkers werethus appealing for injunctions againstdemolitions or eviction in different courtsunder different names. When a hawker losta case in the city civil court, he or shewould move the high court without reveal-ing the details of the earlier case. Some-times, a wife or a brother would moveanother court over the same hawking spot.The hearings and adjournments translatedinto valuable business time for thehawker.67 Construction magnates ofcourse, routinely used such strategies to

evade challenges to their violations ofzoning and construction requirements; whatmade news, however, was that the lowlyhawkers were now doing so too.

Hawkers too are committed to servesociety, wrote M K Ramesh in the After-noon Despatch and Courier. Ramesh,himself a hawker, was writing a letter inresponse to a news article that described

hawkers as merciless. They could notsurvive unless they pleased their custom-ers, Ramesh pointed out, expressing a viewthat seldom made it into the regular newscolumns.68

Hawkers have not been slow to engagein speculative activity either, and in con-structing the kind of virtual economiesusually associated with more high profilebusinesses. Thus for instance, the wardofficer for Churchgate, R K Vale observed,(T)here is a racket to create non-existentand ghost hawking sites or hawking spaces

in non-existent and fictitious names witha view to secure hawking spaces for (the)future.69

Conclusion

In their rudimentary form, the marketwill always be with us, because, as Braudelwrites, in its robust simplicity it isunbeatablethe primitive market is themost direct and transparent form of ex-change, the most closely supervised andthe least open to deception.70 Even if

airconditioned stores are seen as the des-tiny of Indian markets, and the pheriwalais thought to be either a relic from the pastor a symptom of corruption and regulatorylaxity. There is no simple linear historyof the development of markets. In this area,the traditional, the archaic and the modernor ultra-modern exist side by side, eventoday.71 Where cultural or political dif-ference is encountered, it cannot be easilyabsorbed within a perceptual apparatuswhose chief value is precisely the blurringof differences in favour of a homogenis-

ed apprehension of a loosely understoodwhole.

Partha Chatterjee has argued that theIndian state, on account of its limitedresources, is confronted by a populationthe majority of whom are de facto deniedthe full privileges of citizenship. In sucha situation, the state necessarily has toaddress itself serially to informal represen-tations by excluded groups, on terms thatare particularistic, since to apply them toeverybody would be unaffordable. Com-munity, Chatterjee argues, survives as the


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mode through which the state negotiateswith groups who find themselves outsidethe ambit of formal citizenship rights. Thatis, it is not by arguing for the liberal rightsof individuals that these groups manageto be heard by the state. Rather, they makedemands based on group right and com-munity identity, transcending their limita-tions as disempowered individuals. No-

where in received understandings of theliberal state can we find models to assesssuch non-rational and non-formal negotia-tions, Chatterjee points out. There is anentire realm of politics not captured by theideas of liberal politics, where in fact adifferent and more fluid set of normsoperate, partly for historical reasons andpartly for reasons of resource constraint(themselves historical of course).

It can be argued that the pheriwala is onesuch extraordinary class of citizen-sub-

jects that the developmentalist (and now

liberalising) state in India produces as avulnerable category of persons. The pro-tection of pheriwalas as workers engagedin the informal economy (with the OlgaTellis v BMC case in 1985) was alsoprecisely the moment when their legalclassification as hawkers rendered themavailable for all manner of regulation.72

The renewed interest in controlling cityspace as a corollary to new regimes ofaccumulation and the enforcement of anew commodity aesthetics must be locatedagainst this historical process.

Where Chatterjees argument encoun-ters difficulties is in its assumption that theinformal relam of state negotiation retainsits populace within an ethical discourse,even if legal rights are denied to them. Acertain arbitrariness attends the statesinteractions with those outside the law,exemplified in violence such as that againstpheriwalas. And when the law seeks topronounce on their condition, a neoliberalclimate dispels the informal guaranteesthat safeguarded hawkers lives under anearlier dispensation.

Thus a Mumbai High Court judgmenton July 5, 2000 ruled that only licensedhawkers (of whom there are 15,000) couldoperate in the city; allowance would bemade for an additional 23,000.73 But thecity had not issued licences since 1978,and, as the president of the Hawkers Unionpointed out, the larger issue was the ac-commodation of the several hundred thou-sand unlicensed hawkers.74 Hawking wasto be carried out only in specified zones,and banned entirely in the citys C ward,which contained prime locations such as

Victoria Terminus and Flora Fountain.Solid or cooked food was to be banned forhealth reasons, but fruit juices wereallowed.75 The order was plainly absurd,but it put a question mark over earliervictories such as the Olga Tellis judgment,which guaranteed the constitutional rightto seek a livelihood in public spaces.Citizens Forum for the Protection of Public

Spaces, the petitioner in the case, wasslightly dazed by the extent of its victorywith this sweeping court verdict; pave-ments, one columnist wrote, are for pede-strians, at last.76 The only way to enactthe apparent civility of this statement, andfructify the homogeneity of vision itrepresents, is unfortunately through vio-lence on the majority polulation excludedfrom its sight.

Notes

[My thanks to Maharukh Adenwalla, DarrylDMonte, Colin Gonsalves, Nayana Kathpalia,Sandeep Yeole, and the archivists at the Centrefor Education and Documentation in Mumbai. Anearlier version of this paper is forthcoming inSocial Text No 68.]

1 I draw from Claude Lefort the idea that onesociety can be distinguished from another interms of its regime, i e, the manner of shapingof human coexistence. The institution of a newvisual regime thus involves a process of thereconfiguration of politics and the reshapingof the public; it simultaneously presents atechnology for the perception of social relationsand for staging them before society at large.Claude Lefort, The Permanence of theTheologico-Political? in Democracy and

Political Theory. Tr David Macey. Minnea-polis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988,p 217.

2 For a more detailed argument, see ArvindRajagopal, Advertising, Politics and theSentimental Education of the Indian Con-sumerVisual Anthropological Review, Vol 14,No 2, pp 14-31, 1999.

3 The ad was scripted by Piyush Pandey, andwas made by Ogilvy and Mather. Thanks toAshok Sarath for this information.

4 I thank Santosh Desai of McCann-Ericksonfor making a copy of the ad available to me.

5 Georges Bataille has argued that a society isdetermined not so much by its mode of produc-tion as by the mode of expenditure of its sur-plus. SeeThe Accursed Share, Vol 1:Consump-

tion. Tr H Robert Hurley. New York: ZoneBooks, 1988, 167-181. In this formulation,consumption and destruction can be equallyaccommodated.

6 Since the 1980s, state-led economic develop-ment formulated under prime ministerJawaharlal Nehru is being abandoned in favourof market liberalisation. Although the stateretains enormous power, its class biases aresharper, and the forms of its legitimation reflectthis shift in interesting ways. See my Politics

After Television: Hindu Nationalism and theReshaping of the Public in India, CambridgeUniversity Press, Cambridge,UK,2001.

7 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project trHoward Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin.Harvard University Press,Cambridge:1999,

827-891; Susan Buck-Morss, The Flaneur,the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politicsof Loitering, New German Critique 1984,99-140; Allen Feldman, Cultural Anesthesia:From Desert Storm to Rodney King,American

Ethnologist, Vol 21, No 2, 1994.8 Bombay Times, TheTimes of India, 15 July,

2000.9 Keith Hart, Informal Income Opportunities

and Urban Employment in Ghana, Journalof Modern African Studies, 11(1), pp 61-89,1973. See in this context the special issue ofSeminar (New Delhi) on street vendors inIndia, No 491, July 2000.

10 The landmark judgment in this respect is OlgaTellis and Ors v Bombay Municipal Corpora-tion and Others (1985) 2 Bom CR 434 1985(3) SCC 545 AIR 1986, 180.

11 See Mitchell Duneier, Sidewalk. New York:Farrar, Straus and Girouzx, 1999; Mike Davis,City ofQuartz. London and New York: Verso,1992.

12 See Allen Feldmans essay in this volume.13 Y C Pawar, Additional Commissioner of Police,

Mumbai, personal interview, July 2000.14 Lina Choudhury, Mumbai Turns Streetsmart

as BMC Does a Clean-Up Job The Times ofIndia, July 9, 1998. See also Ranjit Khomne,Poor Hawkers Complain of Extortion by

Police, The Times of India, 23 Nov 1998.15 Here what is interesting is the way in which

state apparatuses devolve onto and work outthrough the middle classes and the Englishlanguage press (see below), through muchmore decentralised and therefore chaoticmechanisms. Thus for instance the clippingsfiles of citizens organisations lobbying forand against hawkers both feature news almostexclusively from English language papers.

16 Bombay Metropolitan Development Authority, Draft Plan for 1995-2005, Mumbai 1997.Cited in Sharit Bhowmick, A Raw Deal?Seminar, ibid, 21.

17 A study of hawkers determined that one-fourthof them could not read or write, and that thecost of their wares ranged from Rs 500 to

Rs 2000. The most common reason providedfor engaging in hawking was that it provideda more respectable form of existence than mostof the jobs available in the unorganised sector.From Sharit Bhowmik, Hawkers Study: SomePreliminary Findings, unpublished ms, nd.The report is based on preliminary results ofstudy of hawkers in eight cities: Mumbai,Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Patna, Bangalore,Indore, Bhubaneshwar and Imphal. The datafor the study was collected by the NationalAlliance of Street Vendors of India (NASVI).For discussion of conditions of work and lifeamongst the informally housed and the in-formally employed in Mumbai, see also BrahmPrakash, The Urban Dead-End? Pattern of

Employment Among Slum-Dwellers , Somaiya

Publications,Bombay: 1983, Chapter 5; andHeather Joshi and Vijay Joshi, Surplus Labourand the City: A Study of Bombay. OxfordUniversity Press, New Delhi:1976, Chapter 3.For more general discussions, see Jan Breman,Footloose Labour: Working in Indias In-

formal Economy : Cambridge University Press,Cambridge, UK 1996; Hernando de Soto,The Other Path,: Harper and Row, New York1990.

18 Samrat Sinha, Pheriwallah Marketing, The Economic Times, August 5, 2000, p 7.

19 Karl Marx, Introduction to the Critique ofPolitical Economy, in A Contribution to theCritique of Political Economy, tr N I Stone,Charles H Kerr, Chicago: 1904, p 298 (tr modi-fied). Cited in Gilles Deleuze, Capitalism,

-29


11/11


in The Deleuze Reader ed Constantin VBoundas. Columbia University Press, NewYork: 1993, p 236.

20 Deleuze, ibid, p 236.21 Christophe Asendorf,Batteries of Life: On the

History of Things and Their Perception inModernity Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1993.

22 Nadia Seremetakis, The Senses Still:Percep-tion and Memory as Material Culture in

Modernity.Westview Press, Boulder,Colorado1994.

23 Sandeep Yeole, Secretary, Ghatkopar (W)Pheriwala Samiti, personal interview, Mumbai,July 12, 2000.

24 Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce:Civilisation and Capitalism, 15th-18thCentury, Vol 2, tr Sian Reynolds. Harper andRow, New York:1982, p 26.

25 Vikram Kaushik, General Manager, Colgate-Palmolive personal interview, Mumbai, June2000.

26 Jean Renoir has made this point about com-mercial cinema. Jean Renoir and RobertoRossellini interviewed by Andre Bazin, inRoberto Rossellini,My Method: Writings and

Interviews, tr Annapaola Cancogni, MarsilioNew York, November 1995, 96.

27 Here I consider commercial television as em-

blematic of the work of television in capitalistsociety.

28 Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching:Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking ofthe New Left. University of California Press,Berkeley, CA: 1980, p 3.

29 Raymond Williams, Television: Technologyand Cultural Form, Schocken, New York:1975.

30 Ibid. p 90.31 Williamss own analysis however, distin-

guishes between the true flow and what appearsas the flow, the published sequence of pro-gramme items (p 90), and thus misses themultiple flows that television brings together.Arguing that the distinguishing characteristicof the flow is the fact of its being planned, he

identifies audience experience as well as a flowinsofar as it is an effect of this planned flow(pp 95-96). He thus takes the concept literallyand misses its most productive insights, Isuggest.

32 Richard Dienst utilises an important distinc-tion, between the time of the image and thetime of viewing, in Still Life in Real Time:Theory After Television. Durham: Duke Uni-versity Press, 1994, pp 58-59. Mary Ann Doanehas written that televisions greatest ability isto be there both on the scene and in yourliving room. Mary Ann Doane, Information,Crisis and Catastrophe in Logics of Tele-vision: Essays in Cultural Criticism ed PatriciaMellencamp, 1990, p 238. According to tradi-tional notions of time and space, as SamuelWeber points out,television can be neither fullyhere nor fully there; it is rather, a split or aseparation that camouflages itself by takingthe form of a visible image. That is the veritablesignificance of the term television coverage: itcovers an invisible separation by giving it shape,contour and figure. See Samuel Weber, Tele-vision: Set and Screen in Mass Mediauras:Form, Technics, Media by Samuel Weber, ed,Alan Cholodenko, Stanford, 1996, p 120.

33 Marshal McLuhan, Understanding Media.34 Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern

Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalita-rianism, ed John B Thompson, : MIT Press,Cambridge, Mass1986.

35 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trRichard Nice, Stanford University Press,

Stanford, CA:1990: 107. My invocation ofBourdieu here is not without misgivings. Seefootnote 39 below.

36 Here we can recollect the arguments of JurgenHabermas, about the intimate space of bour-geois domesticity, and its freedom from instru-mental and market relationships, that laid thefoundation for the possibility of the publicman, who engaged in rational-critical dialogue.I suggest that, while such gendered, bourgeoisrelations may anchor the development ofrational-critical sensibilities, Habermas is in

fact elaborating on aspects of the communi-cative logic of print capitalism, by identifyingit with a particular phase of west Europeanhistory. This logic becomes clearer with elec-tronic capitalism, I suggest. See his StructuralTransformation of the Public Sphere: AnInquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society.Tr Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence.Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989.

37 I am indebted to the work of Appadurai for itssustained effort to think through the contra-dictions of a broadly located historical conjunc-ture, and in challenging the applicability ofreceived notions to understand new culturalforms. See his Modernity at Large: TheCultural Forms of Globalisation, Universityof Minnesota Press, Minneapolis:1986, p 3.

38 See Appadurai, ibid, p 8.39 For a more elaborated argument, see Arvind

Rajagopal, Politics After Television: HinduNationalism andthe Reshaping of the Publicin India. Cambridge University Press,Cambridge, UK: 2001, Introduction.

40 G R Khairnar, personal interview, August 15,2000, Mumbai. A few details about the prac-ticalities of demolition. The cost of demolitionis estimated at Rs 15,000 per day for demo-lishing nearly 500 structures in the 12 to 14hours of duty. This included the cost of 8vehicles, staff and constables. This cut intothe BMC budget as the corporation received amere Rs 20,000 when the goods were auctionedafter a month of its seizure. To release a loadedhandcart, the cost is Rs 5000, and for a stall,

Rs 3000. Demurrage charges ranged fromRs 100 to 500 per day per item. It is thencheaper to buy the goods back from whoeverpurchases them at the auction, usually at amuch smaller priceRajshri Mehta, BMC GetsOrder for Bonfire of Demolition Debris,Asian

Age, 15 June, 2000.41 Suresh Kapile, general secretary, Mumbai

Hawkers Union, quoted in Sold out: Hawkersat Nariman Point,Bombay Times, The Timesof India, March 8, 2000.

42 Hawkers Threaten to Demonstrate OutsideLegislators Homes, The Times of India,June 22, 2000.

43 Ibid.44 Horniman Circle Association, Restoring a

Banking District, Urban Design ResearchInstitute, Bombay: 1999, 19.

45 Jagdeep Desai, Theirs or Ours?, The IndianExpress, March 13, 2000.

46 Prasanna Khapre-Upadhyay, Trouble in theTwilight Zone, The Express Newsline, April24, 1999.

47 Namita Devidayal, Impasse Over HawkingZones Continues, The Times of India Sept 15,1998.

48 The proposal for non-hawking zones wasmade by Vishnu Kamat, a retired BMC officer.See Mumbaiites Oppose Hawking ZonesPlan Tooth and Nail, The Times of India,February 3, 1999.

49 At the time of writing, US$1 equals approxi-mately Rs 45.

50 Olga Tellis and Ors v Bombay Municipal

Corporation and Others (1985) 2 Bom CR 4341985 (3) SCC 545AIR 1986, 180.

51 Sobha Singh, handcart rental operator, personalinterview.

52 Vidyadhar Date, Hawkers Come Together toForm National Union TOINS, The Times of

India, September 17, 1999.53 Sujan Dutta, City Lights, The Telegraph,

December 1, 1996.54 Himanshi Dhawan, Roadside Stalls Offer

More than a Meal, The Times of India,August 1, 1999.

55 However, one study in Pune showed that thecheapest street food was equally or less bacteria-laden than restaurant food. Irene Tinker, StreetFoods: Urban Food and Employment in

Developing Countries, Oxford UniversityPress, New York: 192. Cited in Geetam Tiwari,Encroachers or Service Providers? Seminar(New Delhi) No 491, July 2000, 31.

56 Raju Z Moray, Trampling Over Footpaths,The Indian Express, September 19, 1998.

57 Namita Devidayal, Impasse Over HawkingZones Continues, The Times of IndiaSeptember 15, 1998.

58 Namita Devidayal, As Frustration LevelsIncrease, A Citizens Movement Takes Shape,The Times of India, March 8, 1999.

59 Hawkers Paradise,Afternoon Despatch and

Courier, May 5, 1999.60 Tina Chopra, Vested Interests Hold-Up

Solution to Hawkers Impasse, The Times ofIndia, February 8, 1999.

61 Nepean Sea Residents Try to Curb HawkerMenace,The Times of India, October 11, 1999.

62 Mohan Chauhan, quoted in Sold Out: Hawkersat Nariman Point,Bombay Times, The Timesof India, March 8, 2000.

63 Quotes from Tina Chopra, Vested InterestsHold-Up Solution to Hawkers Impasse, TheTimes of India, February 8, 1999.

64 Ghatkopar (West) Pheriwala Samiti meeting,August 2000, Field notes.

65 Munna Seth, handcart supplier, Ghatkopar (W),Mumbai, Personal interview, August 2000.

66 In a sign of the escalating war against hawkers,

even paotis are no longer officially issued.This merely meant, however, that revenue wasdiverted from the BMC to private hands, oftenof public servants. Express News Service,Scrap Paoti System, HC Orders BMC, The

Indian Express, April 21, 1999.67 Namita Devidayal, How Stay Orders Become

the Order of the Day, The Times of India,April 22, 1999.

68 M K Ramesh, Letter to Editor: Hawkers tooare Committed to Serve Society! Afternoon

Despatch and Courier, April 19, 1999.69 Namita Devidayal, How Stay Orders Become

the Order of the Day, The Times of India,April 22, 1999.

70 Braudel, Fernand Braudel, The Wheels ofCommerce: Civilisation and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Vol 2, tr Sian Reynolds, Harperand Row, New York, 1982, p 29.

71 Ibid, p 26.72 Olga Tellis and Ors v Bombay Municipal

Corporation and Others 2 Bom CR 434 1985(3) SCC 545, AIR 1986, 180.

73 HC Judgment allows BMC to Set Up SeparateHawking Centres in City, The Times of India,July 6, 2000.

74 Hawkers Union to Challenge High CourtOrder, The Times of India, July 7, 2000.

75 HC Judgement allows BMC to Set Up SeparateHawking Centres in City, The Economic Times,July 6, 2000.

76 Gerson da Cunha, Victory Crowns CitizenEfforts, Bombay Times, The Times of India,July 8, 2000.

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