13 June,2021 07:55 AM IST | Mumbai | Sucheta Chakraborty
A transgender dancer at a private wedding reception in Mumbai organised by Madhu Shinde. Pic courtesy/Kunal Vijayakar, Duke University Press
Over a dinner in Mumbai in the winter of 2017, ethnographer Lisa BjoÃÂrkman and a colleague got talking about the many skilled people they had encountered during their research in the city, in particular, a "plumber" named Sunny. His expertise in procuring official water connections for households without residential documents had been at the heart of a high-profile hydraulic debacle in the eastern suburbs. BjoÃÂrkman wondered if she could get other ethnographers with research projects in Mumbai to draw up profiles of similar people, "someone who is not the main protagonist of our research in Bombay [the official "water engineer" or the "film director"], but rather that person who always seems to be hanging about; the person who, even if we can't quite make out what they actually do for a living, nonetheless, appears to be indispensable to whatever it is that our research is trying to understand: how movies get made; how buildings get built; how political rallies assemble their publics," she says, in an email conversation with mid-day.
These profiles now form a part of Bombay Brokers (Duke University Press), which took over four years to put together. An India edition has been delayed due to the pandemic, but BjoÃÂrkman hopes that it will be out soon, along with a planned Marathi edition.
For the book, anthropologists, artists, urban planners and architects collected profiles, which addressed questions around the actual work these people do, often described in nebulous terms like brokerage, and the knowledge and resources required to perform it. The sections also include a biographical component with the profiled person narrating their own personal history and most significantly, address the moralising ways in which others talk about them. "While the people profiled in the book come across as neither heroes nor villains, it's also clear that they're rarely spoken of in neutral terms. Instead, these people tend to be vilified or valourised, or at the very least described with suspicion. So we asked: in what context - and in whose company - is some person or work described using unflattering terms like nuisance or troublemaker, thief or khabri (informant), agent or dalal? And in what context or company might that same person and their work be characterised using more laudatory terms like social worker or karyakarta, sister or friend?," shares BjoÃÂrkman.
In Bombay Brokers, she writes about Dalpat, who she met while waiting outside the office of a senior municipal water engineer, while working on her first book Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: embedded infrastructures of millennial Mumbai. Dalpat's job was to secure all permissions needed from the municipal corporation offices over the course of a construction project, and she explains that while the senior engineer played a more obvious role in Mumbai's water story, Dalpat's knowledge, skills and contacts were important in understanding how water is made to flow through the city.
Atreyee Sen paints a poignant portrait of "prison master" Pawan, who made a profession out of serving out other people's prison sentences, especially those of criminals associated with a top political party in Maharashtra, and whose love for Bollywood music, dance, mimicry and jokes helped him navigate a murky prison system and its agents for years, eventually passing on his skills and knowledge to others.
Srimati Basu's character study of Rajani Pandit, often described as India's first woman detective, probes the beginnings of her truth-seeking nature and shows how, in spite of being the child of a Crime Investigation Department detective, Pandit received little support for her career choice because of her gender. Shailaja Paik's profile looks at Bhimsen Gaikwad, a famous octogenarian Ambedkari poet-singer who spent his life balancing regular employment with his passion for music, which challenged caste discrimination, while Simon Chauchard's profile studies "kingmaker" Srinivasan who produces crowds and choreographs electoral rallies for a Congress party politician. Bhushan Korgaonkar's profile looks closely at the life of Madhu, a man who became a well-known bar and lavani dancer.
BjoÃÂrkman shares that despite the morally dubious nature of the work in some cases, familiarity with the subjects over many years helped writers establish a relationship of trust, which made the subjects willing and even eager to share their stories knowing that names and all identifying information would be hidden.
Were there attributes that these apparently different people had in common that perhaps explained their liminal activities and existences? BjoÃÂrkman says that these commonalities - that they did ethically fraught, yet indispensable work - was in fact the starting point that would get to the specificity of what they actually "brokered", and help shine new light not just on Bombay, but also on churnings at the global level: economic, technological, political, material and ideational. It led to the categorising of the profiles into six broad themes - development, property, business, difference, publics and truth, and the exploring of contradictions, issues of access, belonging, the theatrical dimensions of city life and finally, the existence of multiple truths.
