Institutionalizing Informality: The hawkers' question in post-colonial Calcutta

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.