A Bengali Migrant Woman on her way towards an Unknown Construction Site in Hyderabad
On a summer evening at 4 pm, I came back to Hyderabad from home after a long summer vacation. After vacating the airport premises with my luggage, I was heading towards the roads to find a co-passenger cab. The roads outside the airport were busy with people from different backgrounds, regions, religions, castes, and creeds, while the sun shone a shiny light on all. A woman in this extreme heat was brooming the roadside footpath. I noticed that the footpath was already clean. I was thinking, by keeping myself in her place, that I would never do such work in this heat. How is it different from slavery, or is it some kind of neo slavery? This reminded me of the book ‘Bullshit Jobs’ by David Graeber, where he describes how in the neo-liberal world some jobs are literally pointless, which causes psychological harm. “Bullshit” is a technical term in Philosophy as something said when the speaker has no care for its truth. It is not that there is a denial of the existence of some truth, but to the author the truth is nonsense. Why do we need a person for each building just to guard who is coming and leaving when we ourselves can do this? Another example is the big gig economy jobs. These jobs enact psychological violence on anyone in that job.
But her job is not pointless. We see the social setup, especially in India, where lower castes have been doing these services since ancient times. Though Periyar and Ambedkar started the social justice and self-respect movements, globalization and capitalism have given a new look within the same social structure. She was wearing a saree and a jacket, at a temperature of 38°. It seemed to me that she was enjoying some songs, and she looked happy. Suddenly, a man came towards her with a face of starvation and frustration, wearing a similar-coloured jacket. After talking to her, they sat on a footpath bench where shadows only covered half of their bodies. The woman started serving food with care and love.
My inner thoughts and silence were broken by an old-aged taxi driver who was looking for passengers. He asked me, “Kahan jana hai?” (Where do you want to go?) Usually they speak in English, but I think, due to my attire, he assumed of me an Urdu speaker. I replied with ‘Uncle, I want a shared taxi. I am a student’. He replied in English, “No problem madam, you sit in my taxi, and I will find another passenger in seconds”. The taxi driver’s pleading did not allow me to double-think about booking a taxi on my own. I have experience of dealing with taxi drivers at Delhi railway stations; it was not a big deal to say no to him. After 30 minutes of waiting, he came back with a passenger, a woman probably married. But how do I know if she is married? She was wearing a gold nosepin of a kind which only married women wear in rural West Bengal irrespective of religion or caste. She was also wearing a saree and a dupatta around her head and upper body. An embroidered dupatta and saree are a cultural thing, overlapping religion and culture of some Bengali-Muslim women as far as I know. So I assumed her to be a Bengali-Muslim woman. I looked at her face when she entered the front seat. For a moment I thought, why was she sitting in the front seat but not in the back with me? However, the driver asked me, “Madam, pehle isko chhor denge phir apko, koi paresani toh nhi hai apko?” (Madam, can I drop her first? Do you have any problem with that) As usual, I replied with “nhi, mjhe koi paresani nhi hai” (No, I do not have any problem). I was thinking about the accent of the driver. Urdu? Or Hindi. How do I know if it is Urdu? Is it because of the use of words or accent? No, no, it is Dakhni (Deccani). “And why am I even thinking about this?” I was battling with myself, with arguments and counterarguments. By saying Astagfirullah (God forbid), I stopped my thoughts there.
The woman sitting in front of me was on a call, not a single call, but many calls on her keypad mobile, which had a binding with a rubber band. She was restless and worried. The taxi had not left the airport rotary yet. Suddenly, the woman asked the driver to stop the car there because she did not know the exact location of her destination. The driver knew only the city. The location was explained to the driver by someone on the woman’s mobile, but she was not satisfied. It seemed to me that the woman had no trust in the taxi driver because they did not know each other’s language. In my mind, I praised her for her courageous and cunning behaviour. As a woman, it was obvious not to trust a male driver, especially when she did not know the language of the city.
The woman was warning the driver about her escaping from the running taxi by opening the door. The driver stopped the taxi at the rotary out of fear. At that moment, I thought that I should tell the driver not to force her. If the woman wants to leave, let her. They were trying to solve the problem of location without having an Android phone. For the driver, it was quite difficult to find her place. The driver did not know about all the areas of construction sites in Hyderabad, places where contractual labour works, like bonded labour, without basic facilities, and a lack of any labour unions and rights. I found out that the driver also had a keypad mobile phone. I felt that I was stuck in another world. Unlike urban people, who usually don’t want to say a word in someone else’s mess, I broke my silence by saying “tumi chinta koro na, oke bolo aamar WhatsApp e location pathate” (you don’t worry, tell him to send the location in my WhatsApp). These words brought peace and relaxation inside the taxi. The woman suddenly started smiling by thanking her God. The worry on her face was now gone, as it had never existed. She asked me where I belonged, and told me that she was from Koch Bihar.
So yes, she (I did not ask her name) came to Hyderabad to work as a construction worker. Like her, many people come to metropolitan cities from rural Bengal, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Assam, and Odisha. Earlier, I read reports regarding the conditions of construction workers as part of my internship about migration and citizenship. They live in the worst conditions, lacking housing, sanitation, food, and, most importantly, a health care system. They stay in these construction camps for years and years so that they can send some money to their families who live in rural villages. Their condition in villages is not good, rather exploitative from all sides, such as social, political, and economic. Are they free in India? They are doing slavery, but now they do vote in a democracy. They also know voting can only change the government, not their conditions, so they migrate with a hope for change and for a better life, as she did. She has two children in her village. I did not ask about her husband. I thought it was unnecessary.
The whole way, she was talking to her kids and relatives on the phone. Telling them about the skyscrapers, roads, airport, and every single detail about this new city, Hyderabad. At that time, she was not worried about where the taxi was going. If the driver was a male stranger, she had no tension about how and when she would reach her location. Probably, this migration brought some freedom to her from her family life, but what kind of freedom is she going to achieve as a bonded laborer? Many marginalized people come to these construction sites either with families or alone, only by trusting some agents who also belong to the same marginalized section.
To go to those construction sites, one has to enter through thin and broken muddy roads by leaving the urban cities, highways, and flyovers. At 8 pm, we found her place, the construction site camps in Hyderabad. When our taxi turned towards this kind of road, it was almost about to get dark outside. It felt like the sun also refused to give its light to those camps. The taxi was running on a broken road in parallel to a lake whose shoreline was full of garbage. We entered a dystopian countryside of Hyderabad with under-constructed buildings along with small to medium-sized plastic camps for labor. They have built small ghettos with families, children, men, and women, and new people arrive there every month to join this modern slavery.
I saw a boy running on the side of the same path. The first question came to my mind. Does he go to school or work as a construction laborer? Everything haunted me. I just wanted to leave that place. When she got out of the taxi, she did not look at me once. The only thing I remember till today is her red saree and a plastic bag in one hand and a keypad phone in the other. The moment she saw her known people, she ran like a kid towards them. The taxi driver murmured, with her joy, she forgot to pay me. Now I have to ask her
There is a whole network which is working around how to get a ticket for a flight or train and how to reach the construction sites. When I was talking to her, she revealed that she had a guy with her, and they came together from Bagdogra airport, Siliguri. Both of them came from the same village, but the other person’s construction site was in some other direction. This is why he left her at the airport. However, we all know that people from underdeveloped countries or places migrate to developed countries or places to work there as laborers on bare-minimum wages. For instance, there is a huge outmigration of people from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh to the Gulf countries as a labor force. Their living conditions in those places are like those of slaves. They work in construction sites and also do house services as domestic servants and drivers. Indian laborers are ready to do any work there, either skilled or unskilled, at a low price and also with no accountability in case of exploitation. The capitalist development of West Asia is built on the bodies of migrant laborers.
Comparative migration scholars work on stories of people working in house services in Gulf countries for almost 15 to 20 years in the same jobs as house servants so that their families in India can live with basics. Even though it is an effect of capitalist globalization, the domestic neoliberal policies also provide the space for modern slavery. The multinational companies in the developing countries are part of such projects. Globalization, with industrial development, leads to transnational labor outmigration and domestic interstate labor migration in the metropolitan cities of India. In ‘Colonialism and Migration’, Boogart and Emmer examine how the slave trade due to colonialism largely contributed to labor migration formally or informally within a similar framework but outside the law. During the colonial period, contract labor or the slave trade received an unbelievable momentum. From 1834 to 1937, almost thirty million Indians left India as part of the global division of labor, and just under twenty-four million returned. This was due to the need for plantation labor. Not only the transnational labor trade, but the colonial British East India Company forced the Indians to do regional migration in undivided India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, which continued even after independence to sustain the economies. The increasing commodification of Indian labor and its injection into the global division of labor was a result of the incorporation of colonial India into the capitalist world economy. It also reflects on the everyday life of the post-colonial world.
The taxi driver who helped the woman to reach her destination, the construction site, is also the end face of such labor exploitation. His age and wrinkles on his face were evidence of his serving for a very long period as a taxi driver. He is surviving by rejecting Android and by not using Google Maps nor does he have an online payment scanner, not wilfully but because of his social position. When I asked him for the scanner, he gave me a phone pay number and called his daughter. His patience, tolerance, and calmness from the beginning to the end were the same. I guess it was normal for him, like an everyday affair of his life. There was no frustration, no guilt about wasting hours finding a construction site. It reflects how he has been surviving for years in such a hostile space.
It reminded me of the 1976 film ‘Taxi Driver’ directed by Martin Scorsese with themes of intense urban alienation, the failure of social institutions, post-Vietnam War trauma, imperialist violence, and political scandals. A disturbed Vietnam War veteran, Travis, working as a taxi driver in an immoral and decaying New York City, who witnessed disturbing crimes such as extreme racism, toxic masculinity, and underage prostitution. The whole movie revolves around Travis, who feels the inherent meaninglessness of a better job and big money, and his attempts to save a minor girl from prostitution and trying to build a relationship with an elite woman whom he loves in the 70s New York City.
Hena Naaz, is a student and researcher. Alumna of University of Hyderabad. she researches citizenship, law and Belonging.
Leave a Reply