Doctoral Dissertation Research: Small-scale transport operators and political action

This project undertakes an anthropological study of the small-scale transport sector as a window to investigating urban democracy in a post-colonial mega-city. Thus, the project explores urban democracy for which a study of transporters provides a unique and valuable vantage point. This proposed project will be the first to follow the narrative of legal and political claims-making of these transport operators, as they interact with governmental institutions in India. Translating 'paper laws' into actionable regulation is critical for all legal systems. This research queries how these paper laws, rules and regulations are framed, contested and finally implemented in actual practice. The project accomplishes this by mapping the every-day co-operation and contestation in framing regulations between the communities of operator unions, transport bureaucrats, courts, lawyers, and civic associations to sustain the city-level operation of the law, within the broader narrative of city politics and constitutional rights language. Significant contributions to sociolegal research and anthropology flow from this project.

This project asks: How does the political action of small-scale transport operators--the auto-rickshaw drivers, cycle-rickshaw pullers, and erstwhile horse carriage drivers all belonging to the urban working poor, affect democratic processes in the postcolonial megacity? This study undertakes a historically informed, ethnographic investigation on the legal and political processes by which these transport operators become political agents . The research explores how the working poor participate in and negotiate urban governance, not always through extra-legal mobilizations and demands, but also by working within the framework of democratic policymaking, formal politics, and rights language. The study materials date to 1911, when Delhi became the capital. In its study of democracy, the project brings center stage the collective and individual claims for inclusion that the urban working poor make through their political action. This research, employing both ethnographic and archival methods, will be conducted in courts and archives in India, colonial archives in the UK, government offices, and the street in Delhi. This study examines the entanglement of two fundamental queries in contemporary times: a) how does a democracy actually function? and b) the nature of urbanization processes in our cities in times of great economic, social, and environmental precarity. More specifically, the study investigates how democratic functioning intersects with the lives of the urban working poor whose work straddles the organized and unorganized sectors of the economy in a non-western context. The project has implications for remedial measures to aid underserved, poor workers in urban environments in the U.S. and abroad.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.