In between the men with tongs was the steel, turned by the alchemy of modern engineering and a proprietory process licensed from a German company into a hot, red liquid. I watched the liquid twisting and turning through the belts, sizzling as it ran through the water-filled pipes that cooled down the external surface of the liquid and gave the material the strength and suppleness that would make it so valuable as construction material. It was a long tongue of fire, infernal and alive, claiming the men with the tongs as its servants. If the rolling mill was the heart of the steel factory, the red, pulsating liquid was its soul.
3
The changes that have been wrought in India in the past two decades have not been kind to the poor. Even as the number of millionaires and billionaires has increased, followed by the aspirers from the middle classes, the poor have seen either little or no improvement at all, depending on which economists and policy makers one chooses to believe. The data collected by the Indian government, which has been subject to some controversy for its tendency to downplay the number of poor people and the extent of their destitution, is nevertheless stark. In 2004–5, the last year for which data was available, the total number of people in India consuming less than 20 rupees (or 50 cents) a day was 836 million – or 77 per cent of the population.
The people in this group belong overwhelmingly to what policy makers refer to as the ‘unorganized’ or ‘informal’ sector of the economy, which means that the work they do is irregular, carried out in harsh conditions and offers no security or upward mobility. Many of the people in this category are farmers, but a large number are also migrant workers, people who oscillate between the rural areas where they have grown up and the cities or semi-urban areas like Mahabubnagar where they work. An Indian government report in April 2009 that looked at the ‘informal’ economy characterized migrant workers, along with child labourers and bonded labourers, as being at the very bottom of all those working in the informal economy. Almost all migrant workers, the report noted, face ‘longer working hours, social isolation, lower wages and inadequate access to basic amenities’. They live in slums, are expected to be available to work around the clock and are denied access to the ration cards that would allow them to buy subsidized food from what remains of the country’s public distribution system. And although they are everywhere – huddled in tents erected on pavements and under flyovers in Delhi; at marketplaces in Calcutta, where they sit with cloth bags of tools ready for a contractor to hire them for the day; gathered around fires made from rags and newspapers in the town of Imphal, near Burma; and at train stations everywhere as they struggle to make their way into the ‘unreserved’ compartments offering human beings as much room as cattle trucks taking their passengers to the slaughterhouse – they are invisible in the sense that they seem to count for nothing at all.
It is difficult even to get an estimate of the number of migrant workers in India. The government census of 2001 considered 307 million people, or 30 per cent of the total population, as migrants. In this assessment, however, the census was merely counting people who had moved away from their places of residence, and not the reasons for their migration. The authors of the UNDP report on migrant workers, in contrast, have figured that there are around 100 million ‘circular’ migrant workers in India. Of these, the report notes, the largest number, some forty million people, is engaged in construction, followed by twenty million workers, mostly women and girls, who are employed as domestic servants. From various case studies around the country, the UNDP researchers found that migrant work was often a way of maintaining the minimal standard of living of rural families rather than improving such standards. They also discovered that middlemen contractors often locked workers into high-interest debts, low pay and abysmal working conditions, including the practice of bonded labour for entire families that is especially prevalent among the ten million workers employed by small factories that make mud bricks.
A few years earlier, in Delhi, I met a man who worked for a trade union attempting to organize migrant workers. Among the things he said was that there was an underclass even in relation to the destitute migrant workers, a group so desperate that factory owners often use them as scabs during a strike. These were the people he called ‘Malda labour’ after a town of that name in West Bengal. ‘If you ask any of these men where they’re from, they all say “Malda”. Is it possible for a small town like Malda to have so many people?’ The organizer explained that the men were from Bangladesh, just across the border from Malda. They were Muslims, crossing into India illegally, without any rights at all and often willing to work for a pittance. He told me about an instance when he had visited some Malda labourers in their shanties because he knew that they had been hired to work the next day at a factory where his union had called a strike. ‘We took some food, some cheap liquor and drank them into the ground so that they wouldn’t be able to get to work the next day. It was more food and drink than they’d seen for a long time,’ the organizer said. It wasn’t a terribly ethical thing to do, he admitted, but he didn’t have much of a choice in trying to unionize migrant workers.
Overwhelmingly, it was owners who won in such battles with migrant workers attempting to organize themselves. Vijay had told me about what happened at the steel factory when some workers tried, in the late eighties, to form a union. This was a time when the factory did not depend entirely on migrant workers, and its workforce was divided evenly between migrants and local workers, many of the local people consisting of men from the Lambada tribe. Two Lambada men had taken the lead in organizing the workers, managing to win the support of both locals and migrants and getting the union registered. The labour commissioner, in accordance with the laws, asked the factory management to recognize the union, which it did. When the union demanded better wages and improved safety measures, the management refused. The workers retaliated by going on strike.
At this point, Vijay said, the owners consulted the police, and an officer said that he would help them find a solution. He visited the Lambada village and talked to some of the men there, possibly threatening them and perhaps also offering them money. Soon after, one of the women from the village accused a worker of attempting to rape her. The policeman immediately lodged cases of sexual assault against all the organizers, and this terrified the migrant workers, who began returning to their posts. The strike was broken, all local workers dismissed, and since then the factory has hired only migrants. If Lambadas are given any work these days, it is only as daily-wage labourers.
The migrants keep coming, following routes that seem to be both contingent and considered, subject completely to chance in some ways but perhaps also depending on an intermediary who can provide an introduction that might lead to work. For those who come to Kothur and find work at Vinayak steel, the factory becomes their entire world. It is a place where they work twelve-hour shifts, during the day and at night. It is where they eat and sleep and shit, and when they are not in a workshop or in a loading shed, they are to be found in the barracks that are squeezed in between a coal storage shed and the back wall of the factory complex.
The factory did not charge rent, and its workforce of 1,000 people was mostly concentrated into two rows of concrete cubicles that were topped off with an asbestos roof. Because these quarters were sited in the furthest corner of the complex, it was possible to tour the entire factory without going into the workers’ area, and for the most part, no one other than the workers went there. There was good reason for avoiding the barracks. It was the most squalid and miserable place I had ever seen in my life, more so than the worst slum I had visited. The two rows of cubicles were separated from each other by a little strip of concrete with gutters on each side. There was trash everywhere in the narrow corridor between the rows, and even the verandahs running in front of the rooms were filled with the carcasses of objects: broken chairs and fans, discarded items of clothing, vegetable peelings, leftover food and empty pint bottles of cheap liquor. There was a constant smell of shit i
n the air, and the entire place seemed to be cast in shades of grey.
The repulsion I felt on my first visit was accentuated by the unwillingness of the workers to talk to me. I had been given complete freedom by Venkatesh Rao, the managing director, to interview the workers. It was an unusual decision on his part, especially given the fierceness with which factory owners prevent any scrutiny of their businesses. But Rao wasn’t an owner. He was an employee, if a very well-paid one, and he’d admitted frankly that while he would never be able to improve the conditions of the workers – the owners wouldn’t stand for that, he said – he nevertheless understood how miserable their lives were.
I had appreciated that freedom when it was granted to me. I liked it less the first afternoon I went to the barracks and tried to engage with the workers and found that none of them wanted to talk to me in any detail. I understood why the workers were wary of me. In spite of my telling them that I had the managing director’s permission, they felt uncertain about my presence – afraid that I might be a government labour inspector come to see their living conditions – and were determined, in the way of migrant workers, to avoid any discussions that might imperil their jobs. Some of the workers were teenage boys, in the most obvious violation of laws against hiring children, and they were the ones most anxious to avoid me, replying in monosyllables or smiling and walking away when I asked them questions.
But there was more than just caution involved in their refusal to engage. I was so well fed and well rested in contrast to them that I might as well have come from another planet. They encountered men similar to me every day in the engineers and accountants who also worked at the factory. But the hierarchy and division were clear in those encounters, and men from the managerial class did not cross the border into this living space of theirs. This was their domain, and the only people from outside their class who came here were the labour contractors, the tough middlemen straddling the decent, bourgeois world of management and the rough, desperate realm of the workers.
The workers continued to avoid me as I sat on an unoccupied cot, watching the men as they wandered around in the afternoon heat, bare-chested and clad in faded, checked cotton towels or in grimy underpants. The men appeared shabby and their bodies looked worn out by the work, shorn of flab without being muscular. Some of them carried pots of water to go behind the barracks for a shit. Others pumped small stoves to get the fire going for their evening meal. There was no hint of domesticity about the food being prepared, nor any sign of pleasure. They chopped the vegetables mechanically, smoked a cigarette or a beedi, and urinated into the gutter. In spite of the heat and the absence of fans inside the cubicles, the doors were closed. Some of the rooms had television sets, and there was an occasional flicker of colour and noise when a door opened briefly, giving me a glimpse of men huddled around a screen watching a Bollywood film.
But if the place seemed settled in its hard rhythm, around the edges of that was a sense of flux. A group of five workers from Orissa arrived even as I sat there, having got off a train that morning at Hyderabad and then taken a bus to Kothur. They were all boys of thirteen or fourteen, slightly built and holding cheap duffel bags, looking almost like schoolboys playing truant except for their mature, cautious faces. When I approached them, they answered my questions about where they had come from uneasily, refusing to give me their names. They had worked at the factory before, but they did not yet know what work might be available for them this time around. Then they walked away from me, heading for a room that was apparently vacant.
The largest contingent of workers came from the states of Orissa and Bihar, although there were also men from West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Assam. The barracks were divided along ethnic groups, and I was sitting roughly on the dividing line between the Bihari and the Oriya quarters. A man called Rabinder had been getting his dinner ready nearby – the workers cooked early, around four or five, so that those going off to evening shifts could have dinner before starting out – and I tried talking to him. He was from Orissa, a short man with a paunch and a moustache, his gaze shifty as he responded to my questions. He had been a tailor in his village, he said, and he hoped to go back to that when he had saved enough money.
As I was talking to Rabinder, another man came out of a nearby room and stood listening to us. He seemed different from the workers I had come across so far. He looked cleaner, to begin with, less broken down than even the Oriya teenagers who had just arrived. He was wiry in build, dressed in a yellow T-shirt and Bermuda shorts, and his face had prominently Mongoloid features, with wide cheekbones and tapering eyes. I asked him where he was from and he said that he had come from Assam. I have forgotten almost all the Assamese I once knew, but I remembered enough to be able to ask him his name. His face lit up and he replied in a volley of words, sitting down next to me and smiling even as Rabinder curled his lips in a sneer and walked away. The man’s name was Mohanta Mising. He was twenty-one years old, and he hadn’t been at the factory for more than a couple of weeks.
4
In the late eighties, as Mahabubnagar was industrialized, the old village of Patur had been renamed as the new village of Kothur. Now, at the turn of the century, Kothur was neither old nor new but simply a divided village, sliced into two halves by the highway. The marketplace and the steel factory were on one side, most of the houses and fields on the other. Vijay had a small house in the village, a rudimentary concrete building full of cobwebs and beetles that he had built many years ago. He lived in Hyderabad, and I was on my own in the house except for the watchman and his family who lived in a separate hut diagonally across from me. In the morning, it was a pleasant, almost pastoral place, surrounded by agricultural plots and looking out at the settlement of the Lambadas. The women were striking in their independence and manner of dress, always walking in front of their husbands and dressed in bright skirts and a profusion of jewellery.
Yet the rural life was on the retreat. There were factories everywhere, Papyrus Port close by and, a little further away, the new Hyderabad airport. Much of the land between the city and the airport had apparently been bought up by real-estate developers anticipating the expansion of the city, and it seemed just a matter of time before the Lambadas were forced off the land entirely. Vijay’s house was separated by the highway from the Kothur market and the steel factory, which meant that I had to cross the highway on foot, like most of the villagers. I did so with some anxiety the first time, walking past paddy fields pockmarked with slag to the ramp leading up to the highway. There I followed the example of two villagers, waiting for a break in the traffic coming from Hyderabad and scampering to the median, then waiting again for a gap in the stream of vehicles from Bangalore before completing my crossing. After that, it was a ten-minute walk to the market arranged along the road that had been the main thoroughfare until it was superseded by the new highway.
The market that was the centre of Kothur was a hard, dusty settlement with carts selling vegetables and fruit, pharmacies, liquor stores that traded mainly in pint bottles of cheap whisky, and a couple of cybercafés where the computers seemed weighed down by all the porn that had been surfed on them. There were concrete houses around the edges of the market, looking as if they had been dropped at random on to the fields, some poultry shacks, a jewellery store that doubled as a moneylending operation, and three restaurants. It was at one of these that I took my breakfast and lunch, a cheap meal consisting largely of potatoes and watery dal. Served by ten-year-old boys, the food was consumed eagerly by the tired-looking workers and farmers who ate at the restaurant.
I went to another place for dinner, a dhaba at the very end of the marketplace. Hidden by a row of parked trucks and sitting next to the squeaking complex of a factory manufacturing metal pipes, the dhaba had different names – ‘Bhawani Dhaba’ or ‘Vijai Family Dhaba’ – depending on which sign one chose to read. There were a series of concrete cubicles to one side of a patch of grass, with curtains drawn across them in a su
ggestive manner, and a hallway at the back with plastic tables and chairs. There were never too many customers at the dhaba, but when they showed up, they preferred the booths, groups of tough-looking local businessmen clustered around whisky and tandoori chicken.
I usually sat in the hallway, surrounded by three or four restless-looking teenage waiters, looking out at the rain falling on the new highway. The rain, which came in fits and starts, suggested that the monsoons would be poor that year. It took the edge off the heat, but it also added to the desolate atmosphere of this place that was neither city, town nor village, the marketplace always deserted by nine or ten in the evening except for the occasional drunken man, while above us traffic sped along on the new highway under a bright orange neon sign that said: ‘DO NOT USE CELLPHONE WHILE DRIVING’. There were no women and no children in this world – only men who were either hard, broken-down, or both, a dystopic realm of worker drones producing objects whose purpose seemed unfathomable to me.
It was depressing, and even a little frightening, to cross the highway on my way back to Vijay’s house. I could have avoided this by staying at Papyrus Port and hiring a car, but I realized how much I would have missed. The act of walking changed the way I experienced everything around Kothur. My uneasiness while crossing the highway and the diminution I felt as I walked for what seemed like hours across that flat landscape brought me a little closer to the experience of the workers. Walking shrunk me down to the level of an insect, for even as I made my way slowly towards the steel factory along the dirt track that ran under the highway, I could see the cars and trucks speeding past. It made me feel lost, unfit somehow for the new world I could see up there.
One afternoon, as I made my way back from the steel factory through a series of puddles, I needed to take a piss. There was only one other person visible, a man walking in my direction but some distance away. I urinated against a brick wall, feeling slightly embarrassed. I heard the man come closer and expected him to walk on – a man pissing in the open is a common sight in India – but I could feel him stop when he reached me. He was standing right behind me and at first I was worried that he was the owner of the brick wall I was soaking in my piss. But he stayed silent, and I began to grow puzzled and annoyed. When I finished, I turned around and looked at him aggressively.
The Beautiful and the Damned Page 21