6. - (Not So) Friendly Societies

Summary

For these twenty boys I’ve given four years of my life. I taught them honestly. With these twenty boys I will fight. If you want you can join us …

—Liton, speaking to me about his samiti

Parvez's samiti had seemed for much of my time with the jhupri group little more than a harmless side act to his role as a boro bhai. I knew that at least ostensibly the samiti was a savings group, where each of the seventy labourers deposited 10 taka daily, which he in principle would keep safe for them. I was aware, however, that Rubel, who had similarly run a samiti in the past, had been known to have in fact kept most of the capital. It was also clear that Parvez, unlike Rubel, did not own rickshaw vans apart from his own and did not hence receive income from renting them, nor did he work during the night, instead monitoring activities by the side and fielding questions from the labourers. I sensed then that Parvez was perhaps living on the samiti funds day to day. At times the money given to him was portrayed by the labourers less as a savings system and more as a tribute. When asked why they gave to the samiti, younger labourers in particular would often reply along the lines of: ‘He is our boro bhai, that's why we give it.’ The way it was spoken of was as chanda, with the complexity this word entails. The samiti then seemed to stand alongside the other ways Parvez earned: money from rounding up the boys to attend rallies, some from more dangerous acts of political violence, some from a short-lived syndicate, some from the thieving of vegetable sacks and some from the labourers themselves.

What then also appeared clear was that while larger bodies such as the Van Workers’ Union were intertwined with party politics, whatever this samiti was, it appeared far less meaningful politically than the rallies the group attended or the bombings they orchestrated. A common portrayal of similar societies in academic literature1 is furthermore as mutual aid associations understood within a ‘development’ paradigm, seen as a way of overcoming short-term horizons or mobilising groups in a ‘civic’ manner to better negotiate with the state.