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This article will analyze rural-urban migrant workers' multiple journeys of financial secrecies, gendered solidarities and covert income-management through the use of smartphones and net-banking in the city. Using the narratives of informal domestic workers in Kolkata, a city in eastern India, I show how migrant women managed a shadow network of personal savings, free of surveillance from their rural kin, that was creatively positioned at the interface of modern digital technologies and traditional social relations. I develop the concept of 'migra-monies' to underline how such hidden cash flows within migration landscapes emboldened female workers to envision non-normative gendered subjectivities and economically secure fiscal futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the irreverent and supposedly irrational actions of two protagonists, Prahlad and Shanta, characters that the authors encountered during the course of their extended fieldwork in Kolkata. Prahlad is an Oriya migrant plumber who passionately seeks god at the cost of making money, and resists adhering to rational economic behaviour in the city. Shanta is a grieving mother who relentlessly seeks justice for her son's disappearance during a revolutionary movement that consumed the majority of urban youth in the 1970s. Family, friends, neighbours and employers describe and at time dismiss rgen as pagla or insane. This article foregrounds these expressions of paglami or madness in Kolkata. We ask: how does close ethnographic attention to quotidian madness – its articulations, exploitations and resistances – enable us to rethink urban lives? We argue that dissension, alienation and 'unreasonable fixations' are affective thresholds of a changing city. They corroborate the ways in which the city's transforming political landscape impinges on its ordinary lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For more than a century, hand-pulled rickshaws have been a prominent part of Calcutta's cityscape. Under the veil of modernization, progress, and globalization, however, the government of West Bengal State declared that rickshaws cause traffic congestion and constitute an exploitative use of human labor. Yet, despite the government-imposed ban, rickshaws continue to ply the streets of central Calcutta. Based on interviews with rickshaw owners, operators, public officials, and local residents, we examine the cultural politics surrounding rickshaw pulling in Calcutta. This article shows that the rickshaw wallahs (pullers), who operate as part of the informal economy, provide an expansive range of services not limited to transportation. Indeed, the rickshaw wallahs form an integral part of Calcutta's social fabric, having made a place for themselves by facilitating social interaction and challenging hegemonic ideas and practices about who belongs where. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

La création d'une définition du secteur informel, qui soit universelle de même qu'éloquente au niveau économique, se butte à un problème principal : ce secteur est généralement considéré comme n'étant qu'un segment parmi d'autres du système productif, une variation ou peut-être même une aberration de l'organisation formelle des processus de production et des conditions de travail qui en découlent. Cet article propose une modification de la manière dont le secteur informel est généralement conçu. Pour ce faire, il considère l'économie comme étant un système composé d'une totalité d'individus qui tentent de gagner leur vie, et vise à identifier leurs activités. Les informations présentées ici proviennent de recherches effectuées au Bengale de l'Ouest, en Inde. Une attention particulière est consacrée au rôle des femmes dans l'économie indienne actuelle, étant donne leur position particulièrement vulnérable. L'article conclue qu'il est urgent d'en arriver à une meilleure compréhension de la façon dont les gens gèrent leur vie et de la nature des limitations auxquelles ils sont confrontés TRAVAIL, capital et société 37 (2004) pp. 28-45 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]