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The history of mass political formation in post-colonial metropolitan India has generally been narrated through the optic of ‘competitive electoral mobilization’ of the ‘poor’. How then are we to explain cases of successful mobilization in the terrain of ‘political society’ when some population groups are yet to, or just beginning to, constitute themselves as ‘vote bank’ communities? This article invites us to look into the organizational dimensions of subaltern politics in contemporary urban India. It also prompts us to re-examine the relation between law and subaltern politics. In this light, the article presents some of the major findings of a larger historical anthropology project on the organized mobilization of footpath hawkers in Calcutta since the 1970s. It examines the ways in which the hawkers have acquired and aggregated crucial resources to sustain prolonged anti-eviction movements. In this connection, this article makes a critique of the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the last decade, several influential scholars have rigorously worked on the impact of neoliberal globalization on the poor in the cities of the South. But they have yet to provide a comprehensive account of how and why some groups in the margins are seen to successfully negotiate with the new modes of governing populations and increase their visibility as a 'category,' while some groups fail to do so. This paper seeks to bridge this research gap by comparing a successful and a failed mobilization in Calcutta. In both cases, use of the footpath has been central. The paper shows how the success of the hawkers in claiming the footpath is tied to the marginalization of the claims of the pavement dwellers that has (a) homogenized the representation of the footpath as only used by pedestrians and hawkers and (b) led to the elision of the pavement dwellers as a governmental category. The paper argues that by arrogating to themselves an archival function-which is conventionally associated with the governmental state-sections of population like the hawkers can become successful in their negotiations with the government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last two decades or more, critical scholarship in the human sciences has been commenting on different aspects of the 'archive'. While much has been said on the archive of the state, especially in the historiography of colonial South Asia, very little is known about the archival functions of political parties, movements, grassroots community organisations, and trade unions that are involved in the governance of populations in the post-colonial state. The paper argues that archival claims lie at the heart of negotiations between the state and population groups. It looks at the archival function of the Hawker Sangram Committee (HSC) in Calcutta to substantiate the point. Following Operation Sunshine (1996), a move by the state to forcibly evict hawkers from some selected pavements of Calcutta, in order to reclaim such 'public' spaces, a mode of collective resistance developed under the banner of the HSC. The HSC has subsequently come to occupy a central position in the governance of the realm of pavement-hawking through the creation and maintenance of an archival database that articulates the entrepreneurial capacity of the 'poor hawker' and his ability to deliver goods and services at low-cost. The significance of the HSC's archive is that, it enables the organisation to form a moral and rational critique of the exclusionary discourses on the hawker, mostly propagated by a powerful combination of a few citizens' associations, the judiciary and the press. The paper also documents how the successful mobilisation of a population group like the hawkers is marked by the virtual destruction of a pre-existing archive on the other group of 'encroachers' of the pavement space, the pavement dwellers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper makes an attempt to define 'Street politics' in the context of the contemporary developing world taking encroachment on the public land by the urban poor as a specific case. Depicting thoroughly how the pavement space in the city of Calcutta, India, became a contested site of so many claims ranging from legal to paralegal, the paper seeks to observe street politics not as a process or an institutional form of politics but as a set of relations between the government and the populations on the streets shaped through and conditioned by the operation of the modern governmental systems. The paper uses this understanding of street politics as a prism to gaze at the fuzzy domain of the politics of the informal poor. It subsequently presents a detailed ethnographic account of bow different informal groups invent strategies, sometimes fighting with each other and sometimes making horizontal consolidations, to manoeuvre governmental policies that put restrictions on their livelihood practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]