5 - Durable Obstructions, Spatializing Motion: The History of Footpath Hawking in Calcutta

Summary

The frontiers of Calcutta witnessed a demographic revolution in every direction in the 1950s and 1960s. The city's economic deceleration, which had set in after the First World War, became more acute after 1947. Amidst an irreversible economic decay—through the 1950s and 1960s—refugees from East Pakistan and economic migrants from West Bengal's rural districts came to populate not only inner-city bustees and squatter colonies in the city, but also places beyond the city's civic limits. A report published in the Economic Weekly in 1954, for instance, noted how vacant stretches of land outside the city, between Dum Dum and Barasat, came to be populated by refugee squatter groups in the early 1950s:

Beyond the proper city limits of Calcutta, there are vast lands which are mostly marshy and are full of jungle and mosquitoes, without roads or good water for drinking, and unhealthy. Even the garden houses of Dum Dum, Barangore, Barrackpore, and Kamarhati have such surroundings. …between the industrial belt and Calcutta, away from the Ganges, there were neither villages nor factories before the squatters came. The squatters brought life to this forlorn area. They cleared the jungles, built roads, raised the level of the land by piling up earth on it, sank tube wells, and then built their huts.

Besides claiming land by invoking the Lockean logic of individual labour and self-improvement, these squatters and bustee dwellers—refugees and rural– urban migrants alike—contributed to the creation of an enormous and diverse fringe economy in Calcutta, which, by the 1970s, had come to be known as the ‘informal sector’ at the instance of the International Labour Organization (ILO). Every morning, people commuted to the city from these new suburbs and jabardakhal settlements to eke out a living and returned home in the evening, in suburban trains and buses. Commuting became a mass phenomenon. Along with it came informally settled marketplaces in train compartments, rail stations, tram depots, and bus terminuses.

A section of the urban poor, especially those who migrated from West Bengal's rural districts, made the sidewalks their ‘home’ and stayed there for years and decades.