Negotiating Archives from Below: the Case of the Mobilised Hawkers in Calcutta

Abstract

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 organizations, and trade unions that are involved in the government 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 archive. Another significance of the HSC’s ethnography is that it enables the HSC 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. Finally, the article 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.