Book: Dhobis Of Delhi: An Urban Ethnography From The Margins 1974-2013
Author: Subhadra Mitra Channa
Published by: Oxford
Price: Rs 1,495
This interesting book differs from the usual ethnographies which work with the idea of a synchronic present. As the subtitle reveals, it is diachronic in its research design and is based on almost four decades of the author’s fieldwork in a neighbourhood of old Delhi. It depicts the social world of dhobis (washermen and washerwomen) and the way they organise their lives around the twin notions of jaat and baradari in the very heart of an apparently modern, metropolitan city. It presents their everyday struggles of survival and their manifold strategies of livelihood amidst a fast-changing urban context. The book is as much about the changing fortunes of a marginalised community as about those of a city. In substantive terms, it maps out the minutiae of dhobis’ (including women) sacred, political and cultural realms.
The author tells us about the expansion of the sacred geography of dhobis as they undertake pilgrimages to the char dhams in Uttarakhand, Vaishno Devi in Jammu, and temples in Rajasthan. We know of their dispersal from the lanes and the bylanes of Old Delhi mohallas to the emergent colonies and housing societies of the National Capital Region. We come to know of the total irrelevance of the Yamuna in their lives as urban policies snatched away their access to the river in the name of aestheticisation of the Yamuna’s bank around different samadhis of political leaders. We are also made aware of the impact of the gentrification projects in Old Delhi on their lives and livelihoods.
Intriguingly, the author’s assertion of dhobis’ conscious indifference towards their embrace of an overarching Dalit identity does not sit well with the usual grain of social scientific analysis. Her argument that dhobis shun overt militancy and do not actively seek a political identity as they are dependent on the upper castes and classes in direct personalised relations begs several questions. In that case, resistance should have been elusive to numerous groups and communities in India who are equally imprisoned in similar situations. Likewise, the author’s claim about dhobis’ failure to make the requisite transition from community to class remains caught in conventional sociological binaries. What comes out clearly though is the inherently unequal urban planning exercises that remain insensitive to the livelihood demands of the poor and the deprived. In this sense, the book offers us a nuanced understanding of the layered nature of urbanity in India. It recounts as how a marginal community has been struggling to maintain its foothold in a city that is increasingly trying to exclude it from its landscape. Otherwise an academically rigorous piece of anthropological scholarship and urban ethnography, its understanding of the political
is problematic. On the positive side though, it complicates most narratives of the usual trajectory of Indian modernity. In particular, it demonstrates the palpable presence of caste considerations in India’s informal economy. More importantly, it shows that market transactions are hardly independent of social and cultural networks prevailing in a society at a given point of time.