Cheri Histories: Working Lives and the Production of the Neighbourhood in Madras City, c. 1870-1950

这项研究项目确定了19世纪末出现的一种独特类型的社区，由马德拉斯市不同劳动力阶层的城市工作生活构成。这项研究将“城市工作生活”定义为与土地、劳工和社会政治文化有关的相互关联的社会关系的不断表达，不断地创造和复制工人居住区的空间。与关注单一职业群体(通常是工厂工人)的传统劳动史不同，对城市劳动生活的考察捕捉到了各种各样的新旧劳动形式，表明了社会空间关系的历史性转变。被吸引到马德拉斯寻找工作的移民主要居住在棚户区或切里斯，这些棚户区随着城市的发展而激增。“Cheri”是泰米尔语中的一个词，指的是居住着不可触及的种姓群体的农村定居点，这些种姓群体与村里的其他种姓在空间上是分开的。除去种姓的特殊性，“切里人”也是殖民地记录中用来描述城市工人居民区的一个通用术语。这些社区被称为贫穷、过度拥挤和寄生的社区，代表了殖民时代“现代化”的意想不到的空间。切里斯不能被简化为殖民社会工程的对象，或者被认为是乡村景观永恒的、惰性的延伸。相反，它们构成了一个动态的力场，正规和非正规城市劳动力的不同循环在这里相遇并结合在一起。每一次接触都创造了新的工作和生活空间，改变了城市和农村腹地之间的关系，重新定义了种姓和宗教等社区身份，制造了城市空间相互冲突的社会文化和政治想象，并在切里人身上刻下了几个含义。此外，十九世纪末和二十世纪初居民区的历史与被改造或淹没的较老的聚落、形式和劳动文化联系在一起，导致复杂的日常工作节奏和城市建成景观中的分层时间性。通过五个相互关联的案例研究，该项目的主要目标如下：(A)从历史上揭示日常工作生活中的生产和生殖社会做法，这些做法使切里成为马德拉斯市城市景观中一个独特的空间形态；(B)了解这些空间是如何被不同的劳动群体感知、体验、争夺和占有的；(C)这些社会和象征性做法如何影响精英政治，有时甚至偏离官方城市规划的轨迹。

This research project identifies the emergence of a distinct type of neighbourhood in the late nineteenth century, constituted through the urban working lives of a diverse section of the workforce in the city of Madras. The study defines 'urban working lives' as an incessant articulation of interconnected social relations pertaining to land, labour and socio-political cultures, which constantly produced and reproduced the spaces of the workers' neighbourhoods. Unlike conventional histories of labour, which focus on a single occupational group (usually factory labour), the examination of urban working lives captures a large variety of old and new labour forms, indicating a historical transformation of socio-spatial relations. Migrants drawn to Madras in search of work primarily inhabited squatter settlements or cheris, which proliferated with the growth of the city. 'Cheri' is a Tamil word, which denotes rural settlements housing untouchable caste groups in spatial segregation from the other castes of the village. Stripped of its caste specificity, the 'cheri' was also a generalized term used in colonial records to describe workers' neighbourhoods in the city. Dubbed as poor, overcrowded and parasitic, these neighbourhoods represent unintended spaces of colonial 'modernity'. Cheris cannot be reduced to objects of colonial social engineering or to a presumably timeless, inert extension of the rural landscape. Rather, they constitute a dynamic field of forces where different circuits of formal and informal urban labour encountered each other and combined. Each of these encounters produced new spaces of work and living, transformed relations between the city and the rural hinterland, redefined communitarian identities like caste and religion, manufactured conflicting socio-cultural and political imaginaries of the city space and inscribed several meanings on the cheris. Moreover, the histories of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century neighbourhoods were tied to older settlements, forms and cultures of labour, which were transformed or submerged, resulting in complex quotidian work rhythms and a layered temporality within the built landscape of the city. By way of five interconnected case studies the project has the following main objectives: (a) to historically unravel the productive as well as reproductive social practices of everyday working lives, which generated the cheri as a distinct spatial formation in the urban landscape of Madras City; (b) to understand how these spaces were perceived, experienced, contested and appropriated by diverse labouring groups and (c) how these social and symbolic practices impacted on elite politics and sometimes deflected the trajectories of official town planning.